How to create and sell digital products
Have you ever wanted to start a simple passive income business from home? Well in this post you’ll learn how to create and sell digital products and build a passive income business.
Why Sell digital products
There are many advantages to selling digital products, and why it makes a great passive income business. A major advantage of why you should sell digital products is that they are simple to create and often can be made for free or at very little cost.
This means there is a massive upside and profit available when you promote digital products. On top of that, you can make a digital product once and sell it repeatedly without limits.
This makes selling digital products one of the best passive income businesses you can start from home. Certainly, there are a few tools you want to get to speed up the sales process, but the foundation of creating a product can be done with many free options.
On top of that, there are many varieties of digital marketing products you can promote build a passive income business around. Things like ebooks, audio training, video series, PDF guides, and more.
Foundations of your passive income business – Define your niche and target market
One common mistake people make when they try and sell digital products is that they are trying to market to everyone. Marketing to everyone is really marketing to no one.
Before you even get to what kind of products you want to sell you need to understand who you are selling to. Without fully understanding your target market that you’re trying to help, you will struggle with trying to promote and sell digital marketing products.
As a foundation for anything you want to promote you need to know things like your target market’s common questions, needs and wants, pain points, as well as their goals and desires.
The job of your digital marketing products should be to solve the problems I mentioned above, or help your audience reach their goals faster.
When you create your passive income business centered around this concept, you will make more money, acquire customers faster.
Decide what kind of products you want to sell
Once you’ve decided on an niche, you want to figure out what kind of products want to sell. As I mentioned earlier there are a lot of options you can use for digital marketing products.
Some of the more common options can be ebooks, video series, PDF guides, audio series, among other things.
Ideally you want to make your digital product something that is easy to digest and easy to deliver. All of the options I mentioned above will fit those criteria.
Making a video series is pretty simple as you can just record a series of videos on your smart phone. Then you can host the videos on a free service like YouTube. From there you just have the videos set to unlisted and then have them embedded on a web page. This can be on your own website or a page on a sales funnel system.
You can do the same sort of thing with an audio training as well. Simply record it with a voice recorder app on your smart phone or computer and then host the files on your website. You can also make these audio recordings into a video with many video editing software programs if you’d rather host them on YouTube.
You can also create an ebook or PDF guide with various free software programs like Microsoft word and Google Docs. I put together a video below that outlines creating a simple ebook or PDF guide below.
Make sure your product is easily deliverable
Another thing you want to make sure you avoid while you sell digital products is that it doesn’t become something you have to deliver manually. When I first started marketing my own digital products I made this mistake.
When you try and cut costs by avoiding setting up the right tools to automate it, you can waste a lot of time. Just because something is free, doesn’t mean it actually is.
For example it might be free to manually send out an email to the people who purchase a product from you, but it could cost you hours of time that you could be doing something more productive in your business.
Another thing you want to do is make sure that however you deliver your digital product, it is in a format that anyone can access. For example you might create a product in a software that only runs on Mac computers, but not PCs.
This could cause issues that people with PCs couldn’t use your product, and you might get stuck with complaints and refunds. A better option to do is give away your products in programs everyone has access to for free, such as Google Docs.
When you are just getting started selling digital products you might not be able to afford a full blown membership site, but you can probably use a regular website or sales funnel system. These two options can be used to deliver your products as well.
You could host all of your products on a specific page and that page requires a password to access. You just deliver that password on the order page and/or through an email sent with an email autoresponder after the person buys.
Lead with value first before you try and promote a digital product
Regardless of how you decide to deliver your digital product and what kind of format you go with, you’ll want to be sure to lead with value first. Most people who are going to do business with you and buy your digital products are going to need to know, like, and trust you.
Without that relationship in place, the likelihood that they will buy from you is dramatically less. This is why it becomes so important to lead with value first.
You need to follow the 80/20 rule of 80% of your content needs to be value based and 20% should be promoting and selling your digital products. Unfortunately, most people do the opposite and do 80%-90% of their focus in pitch mode.
This actually pushes people away, rather than draws them to you. Think of the free sample person at the grocery store.
How many times have you had a free sample and ended up buying whatever they were selling. Did they hardcore close you? Or did they just say, “here try this.” and you ended up buying? This concept leads into the idea of lead magnets and using them as one of the better strategies for promoting your business.
You may also want to check out a video below that explains more in detail on how to set up a passive income business with this strategy.
The next step for how to promote a digital product is to set up your lead magnet
A lead magnet is something of value you exchange for someone’s name, email, and phone number. The foundation to this strategy is again leading with value first.
You want to create an offer that helps solve your target market’s problems, helps them avoid pain points, or get a better result faster. This is why fully understanding your niche as mentioned above is so important.
Most people think that leading with value is just giving someone the option to sign up for their newsletter list. While this is a start in the right direction, in reality most people don’t care about joining a newsletter list.
You can still get people to sign up for that, but you need to position it in a way that shows what’s in it for them. A better strategy is to create a free offer as a bonus for signing up for your newsletter list.
You could use any one of the digital products you create as your lead magnet and then make more that you charge for and sell. If you’d like to check out an example of a lead magnet that works well, you can access one of mine on how to grow a business with Instagram.
Set up your email autoresponder to deliver your lead magnets and digital products
An essential tool you’ll want to get as you create digital products is an email autoresponder. With this in place it can help eliminate a majority of the time associated with having to distribute your products manually.
This is a system that will integrate with the lead magnets you create as well. For example with some email autoresponders, such as Aweber, you can make simple sign up forms to build your email list. You can even watch a video below on how to set that up.
Building an email list is one of the best strategies you can do to sell digital products. This allows you to continue to remarket to that list on an ongoing basis and develop a relationship with that list.
As we talked about above, most people won’t buy the first exposure of your product or business. That means that if you don’t have a way to capture someone’s information with a lead magnet discussed above that person is likely gone forever.
After you capture their information, the next step is to set up a drip campaign. If you’d like to try out the email autoresponder Aweber for 30 days for free click here.
Set up a drip campaign to promote your digital product
If you aren’t familiar with a drip campaign, this is a series of emails you will set up in your email autoresponder. Once someone joins your list and downloads your lead magnet you should direct them to the sales page of your product.
As we talked about before, the majority of people might not buy on the spot at that point. However, this is where the drip campaign or email series comes into play. With an email series you will continue to send out emails of a regular basis.
Typically this is between 5 and 10 days of emails. Each email in this sequence will contain more value and information that shows the benefits of the digital products you sell.
With each value based post you send it will build a little more trust, rapport, and credibility with your list. Then you also promote your sales page as a way to take their results further.
It might not be right away, but when timing is right throughout this series, your lead will buy. This is a low pressure way to sell your digital products.
Set up your website and sales funnel system
As mentioned earlier, you’ll want to have a site to deliver your digital products and a way to sell them. This is where having a website and/or sales funnel system in place makes sense to have.
With a sales funnel system set up you can not only create quality landing pages for your lead magnets, but also automate a large part of your business. You can do this with a website as well, but for most people just getting started with selling digital products, they might not have a website design expertise.
With a sales funnel system they will have done for you templates that are easy to create and set up. These can be used for lead magnets, product delivery and as a part of your email series.
If you’d like to get a free 14 day trial of a sales funnel system I’d recommend click here. You may also want to go through my free lead generation boot camp to learn more on how to set up a system like this and promote it. Click here to access my lead generation boot camp.
Set up PayPal
There are several options for collecting payments for your digital products and ways to deliver them, but I’ve found PayPal to be a simple option for most people just getting started.
Setting up an account is free and PayPal will handle the collection and delivery of your digital product when you integrate it with your email autoresponder. This is how I first set up my digital products for sale, and still use it today.
Consider affiliate marketing
If all of these steps on how to create digital products to sell seems a bit much, you may consider starting an affiliate marketing business instead. Affiliate marketing is basically taking the concept of creating a digital product and selling it, with out the set up side.
With affiliate marketing you are simply taking someone else’s product or service and promoting it for them. You’ll often get sales pages and funnels already done for you.
As an affiliate, the creation of digital products, payment collection, and delivery is all done for you. Certainly you don’t make nearly %100 of the commissions you would selling your own products, but if you are just starting this could be a faster way to start making money with digital products.
Your job just becomes the promoter and seller of the digital products. You can more than earn a full time income with affiliate marketing and never have to create a digital product yourself.
Also, all of the skills and strategies I mentioned above to sell your own digital products work just as good with affiliate marketing. If you don’t yet have an affiliate marketing business you may want to check out my affiliate marketing beginners guide.
Clickbank for affiliate marketing
Another great resource if you are just getting started with affiliate marketing and selling digital products is Clickbank. Clickbank is basically a huge library of other people’s products you can become an affiliate for.
If you haven’t yet created a digital product of your own, this could be a great spot to find one to promote. From what I understand all of the products are free to promote there as well.
This could be a great way to start earning income through digital products before you even create one! If you’d like to learn more about earning income with Clickbank, check out this training.
Add in bonuses to people who buy your digital products
Regardless if you go with affiliate marketing, or sell your own digital products, one of the best ways to get people to buy is with offering bonuses. You’ve probably heard the old saying, “but wait, there’s more!”
Well you have because it works. It’s called the value stack and implementing this marketing strategy can really help you increase sales.
If you just offer a single digital product for sale there is certainly value there, but your goal is to create an irresistible offer. You do this through stacking the value.
There are many bonuses you could include to increase the value with digital products. This could be things like a Facebook Q and A group, a coaching call, extra digital products, access to a webinar, and more.
Again think back to the TV infomercials you’ve seen over the years. They don’t just sell you a knife for $19.95, they sell you the knife, and a bonus pan, kitchen sheers, travel bag, and another bonus knife.
Adding bonuses can be a powerful strategy to increase sales. One caution to this is that while you can offer your time in the form or calls or coaching, be careful of that.
As you become more successful and sell more digital products, you don’t want to create a full time job from your bonus offers. Ideally you want to make your bonuses in the form of something that won’t cost you any more time input.
Virtual coaching, through a video series could be a good example of this. You can spend the time input once, and never have to do it again.
Takeaways before you create digital products
Creating digital products doesn’t have to be hard. As an added bonus it can create a very lucrative passive income.
It also allows you to make a creative business based on what you are passionate about.
Following this digital marketing strategy is one of my favorite online marketing tips. As you build up a list and lead with value first it can also be a profitable launch strategy for digital products.
As you have a solid digital marketing product it can be a foundation to your passive income strategies as well as a primary source for your passive income streams. Follow these tips and you’ll have a profitable passive income business in no time.
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