What are digital products? 6 profitable products to sell online.

What are digital products?

Digital products are intangible goods that are available in digital form. These goods include e-books, music, digital art, software, online courses, and virtual goods in video games. They are typically delivered to customers via download or email, providing businesses a way to deliver value without the need for physical inventory.

Why sell digital products instead of physical goods?

There are many advantages that make selling digital products uniquely attractive to entrepreneurs:

• Low operational costs. You don’t have to keep inventory or incur any shipping costs.
• High profit margins. There are no ongoing costs for goods, so you retain most of your sales as profits.
• Instant delivery. Orders can be delivered immediately without supervision.
• Flexibility of products. You can offer free products to build your email list, or paid monthly subscriptions for access to exclusive digital content, or licenses to use your digital products. There are many options to integrate digital products into your business.
• E-learning is the future of education. You have a tremendous opportunity to expand your business and influence with e-learning, an industry projected to reach a value of $840 billion by 2030.

However, online digital products also come with specific challenges that you must be prepared to face:

• You are competing with free content. With digital goods, consumers often have access to free alternatives to what you are selling. This necessitates careful consideration of your niche, the types of products you sell, and how to write your product description.
• You are vulnerable to piracy. You need to minimize the risk of content theft by using tools to protect your products.

Where can you sell digital products?

There are three main channels to sell digital products: your own online store, social media, and digital marketplaces.

You can build your own online store using an e-commerce platform like Shopify, then integrate a digital product application for sale and management. Promote your digital products to your audience via social media. Use native shopping features or link your Shopify store. Create a profile on an approved digital marketplace in your niche and reach a pre-established audience.

Remember, in exchange for exposure, some marketplaces can take commissions of up to 50% on each sale. Avoid seller fees by building your own online destination to sell trending digital products.

Top 6 Digital Products to Sell Online

1. Digital educational products

Online courses are best suited for in-depth content. They require some initial effort, from preparing a presentation to recording a tutorial video. When creating courses, start by defining the learning outcomes: what you want the learner to know or be able to do by the end of the course?

You can include quizzes, assessments, and interactive activities in your courses to help segment learning content and make your educational course more engaging. You might consider learning and implementing a teaching model like ADDIE.

If you are an expert on a topic, compile your knowledge into a convenient digital educational product and sell it to others. For example, How to Cake It sells e-books as an alternative to printed cookbooks.

If there is an abundance of free articles or tutorials on your topic on YouTube, be competitive by offering content that promises transformation rather than education. In other words, don’t sell the product – sell the potential that the customer can achieve after purchasing your product.

You can leverage an already established reputation as an expert to attract attention to your downloadable products for sale online, or if you are starting from scratch, create and offer free content to generate leads for your paid digital products.

2.

Digital Product Licenses

There is a global system of digital assets that can be licensed and uploaded online by creators for the benefit of other creators to use in their work.

By offering licenses to individuals and businesses, you can charge fees for the use of images, videos, music, software, and other popular digital products. You can sell them through your own store, similar to how EditStock sells licenses to students. Alternatively, you can sell them through online digital marketplaces, such as these digital photo selling sites.

When creating assets, it helps to work backwards from the needs of your target audience. Start by thinking about the types of assets they would like to use to determine demand.

Make sure to protect your digital products with watermarks and other security measures, especially if you are selling images.

3. Premium Digital Content Libraries

Instead of focusing on how to sell digital products individually, you can bundle them together and lock them behind a paid subscription to generate recurring revenue.

For example, Snowboard Addiction is a destination for everything related to snowboarding. Customers can shop for actual snowboarding gear as well as downloadable tutorials.

This approach to selling digital products is ideal if you plan to maintain a growing library of premium content and build a community of enthusiastic members. In some cases, paid digital subscriptions can create an opportunity for direct profit from marketing efforts for existing content.

Since this content is only available to paying subscribers through their customer account, you can also host exclusive content that can be streamed rather than downloaded.

You can build a business idea of this kind using subscription billing with Sky Pilot as your digital delivery system.

4. Templates and Digital Tools

Digital products can also come in the form of intangible tools that enable professionals to perform tasks that exceed their expertise or are time-consuming. You can sell digital solutions for common pain points and needs of a specific audience.

For example, RetroSupply Co sells digital product bundles for designers and illustrators across popular apps and software. Other examples of how to sell digital products online in this way include:

• Digital marketing strategy templates for businesses
• Resume templates for job seekers
• Mobile apps for businesses
• Graphic design templates for brochures, flyers, posters, etc.
• Adobe Photoshop filters and plugins for media editors
• Icons and fonts or UX kits for web designers

5. Music or Art

If you are a musician or artist, you have likely explored ways to monetize your talents or the audience you build. In addition to print-on-demand products, there are numerous examples of digital products to sell art and music.

A musician can sell ringtones for their best songs alongside their merchandise. A cartoonist can convert their art into prints and phone wallpapers. A filmmaker can sell their films online.

A successful strategy for selling this type of digital product is to target a unique niche market. For instance, Materia Collective sells digital sheet music for popular video game music.

Since there is no need to hold inventory with online digital products, you can experiment with different formats to see what your audience wants without taking on significant risks.

6. Services

Services pair well with digital products. A designer can offer logos alongside templates. A personal trainer can provide a video workout plan. You can direct some services as packages that include valuable digital products.

For instance, you can offer a consultation for a fee, along with a personalized report or Excel spreadsheet, and then promote your other services or products to clients. Or you can provide a free downloadable product to generate leads for your email marketing list, a tactic many online businesses use today.

If

There were common tasks you performed as part of your service work that were easy for you and valuable to your client, so you could consider turning them into products to create income sources that require less time and effort to maintain.

How to Create and Sell Digital Products

1. Find or Create a Digital Product

Look for a digital product to sell. You can create your own digital products or become an affiliate for an existing creator. Popular digital products include: entertainment content, music, fonts, design assets, Photoshop presets, templates, software, online courses, and other online services.

2. Validate the Product

Make sure to validate your idea before investing too much time in it. The last thing you want to do is invest a lot of time or money into a new project without knowing that it has a good chance of succeeding.

Here are some ways to validate your idea while learning how to sell digital products:

• Keyword research. Use a keyword research tool to see how many people are searching for your topics. This will give you an idea of the opportunity size for each topic.
• Google Trends. Look up your topics in Google Trends. Look for topics that are gaining popularity. This means the opportunity size will continue to grow.
• Facebook Groups. There are Facebook groups dedicated to every niche and possible audience, making them a great place to learn what potential customers care about.
• Industry forums. Forums dedicated to hobbies and communities in your broader industry can help you learn more about what people want and need in your industry.
• Product reviews. Read reviews of your product and competitor products for ideas. These reviews can come from product pages as well as from standalone reviews on blogs and other websites.
• Start small and iterate. Sometimes, the easiest way to validate an idea is to test a smaller version of the idea with room to grow. The goal is to get something into the world as quickly as possible so you can test and refine your idea from there.

3. Create an Online Store

Once you have validated your digital product idea, you will want to get an e-commerce platform to sell on.

Create a website to sell your digital products and get up and running in a few hours. Choose from a catalog of website templates, fill it with your logo, copy, and images, and you are ready to start selling. Choose from over 100 templates with built-in features to quickly set up your Shopify store.

Shopify is the easiest and most reliable way to create an e-commerce store for digital products online. You don’t need any technical skills or a big budget, and you can choose from over 100 templates with built-in features to get started quickly.

There are also over 4000 free Shopify apps you can use to manage your store and sell more digital products online. The apps make delivering digital products easier than ever. Browse the app store to find apps that connect to your store and do everything from hosting course content to delivering PDF purchases.

4. Market Your Digital Products

After you have a digital product and an online store, it’s time to find your customers. If you are selling fonts or design templates, build an audience of designers and creators on the social platforms they use most. Also, look into influencer marketing, social ads, or marketing magnets.

8 Apps to Sell Digital Products on Shopify

• EDP – Easy Digital Products. EDP is a popular app for selling downloadable files and license keys from your online store.
• Filemonk. Filemonk is designed to make selling and marketing digital products as easy as possible for Shopify merchants.
• SendOwl.
  For complex digital product businesses, SendOwl comes with a variety of automation features.
• Courses. This Shopify app allows you to create lessons, tutorials, webinars, user guides, and sell them online.
• Single. If you’re a musician selling music, Single bridges the gap between physical and digital music sales.
• FetchApp. FetchApp is another digital delivery app with a free plan available (five megabytes of storage).
• Sky Pilot. This app is for building a membership program. Sell files and stream exclusive video content to customers.
• BookThatApp, Tipo, or Sesami. Use these apps to schedule consultations or training sessions with clients. All three have a free plan available.

In addition to these systems for delivering digital products, there are other Shopify apps to operate and protect your digital goods, such as:

• RecurrinGO! This is an app for weekly or monthly subscriptions. Use it to manage recurring orders and billing for digital memberships or online programs.
• Disable Right-Click. When your content is your product, this app helps you protect it from theft. You can lock images and text so they can’t be saved or copied without your permission.

Tip: When creating digital products in Shopify, be sure to uncheck “This is a physical product.”

Tips for Selling Digital Products

Whether you’re a new business owner or adding digital products online to your existing store, remember these tips:

Create a Great Digital Product

The first standard for creating digital products is to add value to your customers’ lives. Since you’re competing with free content online, invest in building a product that people can’t find anywhere else.

Promote a Free Lead Magnet

No matter the cost of your product, create a light version of it for free. The free product can help build an email list you can sell to in the future. It also opens the door for upselling and retargeting potential customers with different offers. Free products can build trust between your business and potential customers.

Start an Affiliate Program for Your Product

Partners are a great source of traffic and sales for creators selling digital products. Look for influencers who are trusted and recognized in your industry and offer them a commission for each sale they make. You can create different commission rates for different partners, so if someone has a large audience, you can give them a higher commission rate to promote more and attract customers.

Collect Pre-Orders

A great way to get early sales is to offer a discounted “early bird” price. If you’re launching a new digital product, you might offer a 50% discount for the first 100 buyers, then 25% for the next 100 buyers, before releasing the product at full price once the 25% discount period ends.

Offer a Money-Back Guarantee

If you hesitate to offer a guarantee on your products, that’s understandable. Some people might buy the product, use it, and then request a refund. But it’s all part of running an online business. The rewards of higher conversion rates outweigh the small percentage of people who may misuse the policy. A money-back guarantee shows potential buyers that you’re taking the risk, not them. A money-back guarantee shows potential buyers that you’re taking the risk, not them.

Create the Best Digital Products for Your Business

Without the need to hold inventory or the overhead associated with selling physical products, all kinds of digital products can be a profitable online business idea. There are many ways you can create the best digital content to sell, resell, and integrate into your business. With some savvy and an initial investment of time, you can provide unmatched value that pays for itself over time.

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Source: https://www.shopify.com/blog/digital-products

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