Although digital products cannot be held, tasted, or touched, they are consumed by everyone—from music to videos, ebooks to online courses, and everything in between.
Due to their popularity and ease of distribution, many entrepreneurs build entire businesses around these intangible goods or develop digital products to sell alongside the physical items or services they provide.
What makes learning how to sell digital items so tempting is that they can be made once and sold repeatedly to different clients without requiring inventory replenishment, making them great for creatives, bloggers, educators, and freelancers searching for passive ways to make money online.
In this article, I’ll share with you the 5 profitable digital products you can sell online and how to create your own products.
Table of Contents
What are digital products?
Intangible assets, essentially. Digital assets are media that can be sold repeatedly online without the need to physically replenish inventory – in most cases it is created once. As a result, digital materials such as audio files, PDFs, videos, plug-ins, and templates are usually available as downloadable or streamable digital files.
Advantages of selling digital products over physical goods
- Low overhead. You don’t have to keep an inventory and there are no shipping costs.
- High-profit margins. There are no recurring costs of goods, so you keep the majority of your sales as profit.
- Automation potential. Orders can be delivered instantly, so you’ll be relatively convenient with fulfilling them.
- Flexible products. You can offer free products to build your email list, monthly paid subscriptions to access exclusive digital content, or licenses to use your digital products. You have many options for integrating digital products into your company.
- Online learning is the future of education. You have a tremendous opportunity to grow your business and impact with e-learning.
Selling digital products comes with a number of challenges. The most obvious thing is that you are competing with content that is freely available on the internet. The solution to this is to make sure you have high-quality products that you are proud of and that represent your brand well. There will always be free alternatives and you are prone to theft. However, you can take certain precautions to reduce these risks.
5 profitable digital product ideas to sell online
- Educational information products
- Licenses to use your digital assets
- Membership Pages
- Digital templates and tools
- Services
Educational information products
Online courses are best for in-depth content that requires walkthroughs and other specific results. The courses are not difficult, but neither are they easy. They definitely require effort in advance.
A course must have engaging content that makes the process interactive, be it in the form of quizzes or tests. It has to be an improvement over free blogs or YouTube tutorials as the end goal is to deliver transformative results.
If you’re just starting out and don’t have expert status, you can create miniature versions of your course materials and give them away for free with the aim of generating interest in your paid digital product.
Always ask yourself: What should the learner be able to do at the end of the course?
Licensable digital assets
There are countless individuals and companies looking for digital assets to use for their own purposes. From stock photos to sound effects, there’s nothing creative can’t do that can’t be turned into licensed digital assets that others can use in their work – legally.
The idea is that you are billing for the use of your assets through your own business or marketplace. But while you can create almost anything, you should consider the needs of your target audience and create the assets that are in demand at the time.
Paid Membership Sites
Instead of selling individual digital products like an e-book, there is also the option of bundling everything in sequential order and placing it behind a paid monthly subscription to generate recurring income.
For this, to work you need to maintain a library of quality content and a community of members, most likely in a private Facebook group.
And you can create this with a free GrooveMember® account.
Digital templates and tools
Digital products can also be tools that help professionals complete tasks that normally take a long time. It depends on creating solutions to common vulnerabilities for a niche. It’s a great way to convert your skills into digital products that can create passive income for your business.
Services
Unlike digital products, your services are limited to the number of hours you can spare. In other words, you’re offering your time at a premium price alongside a free digital product. This can be advice, for example. The downside is you have to trade your time, but there are certain tasks that you can produce to create more revenue streams that require less maintenance.
How to create digital products
Spend as little time as possible on your first iteration. Make it easy and get published asap, make sure you have room to change and improve your material. There are many ideas, maybe too many, but often people don’t take action. To guide you from idea generation to execution, you can follow the process of brainstorming, research, and validation.
Brainstorming
Generate ideas to come off and just start writing them all down. Do a massive brainstorming and don’t be critical at this point, because bad ideas can lead to good ones!
Here are some questions to ask yourself:
- Are you able to instruct customers on how to use your products?
- Are there any things you can do to help your customers across your entire industry?
- What topics are related to the values on which your company is built?
- How could you bring your customer community together?
- What are you good at?
Research
Industry experts and thought leaders also need to research and stay up to date on their topics. Add a little research to your list of ideas and find the weaknesses that exist in relation to your product, service, industry, or values.
Here are a few places you can start doing basic research:
- Youtube
- SkillShare
- SlideShare
- Books
- Facebook groups
- Industry forums
- Product reviews
- Blog posts and comments
Validation
Before devoting too much time to any particular idea, you should validate it and make sure it is viable. The last thing you want to do is invest a lot of time or money in a new business without knowing that it has a chance to succeed.
Here are a few methods for validating your idea:
- Keyword research
- Google trends
- Please leave feedback
- Start small and iterate
Creating an online shop for your digital products
Here you can build your entire eCommerce store with one GrooveKart account. Once you’ve validated your idea, you’ll want to get it on an eCommerce store ASAP!
You don’t need to be tech-savvy or have a big budget – you can set up everything for free except your domain name. There’s even a 3-day GrooveKart challenge to watch and follow to get your shop up and running in no time.
Which digital products sell best?
Best-selling digital products include e-books, graphic design, templates, downloadable prints, music and audio, stock photography, and print-on-demand products such as custom t-shirts, notebooks, and mugs.
But when it comes down to it, all you have to do is choose something and try it out! Don’t get stuck in perfectionism. The longer you get stuck in the brainstorming phase, the longer it will take to launch your product. And without the massive overheads of selling physical products, just spending the time upfront, you can easily and quickly scale digital products into a profitable online business.
The truth is, whether or not you are a new company or an established business, there are numerous ways and reasons you could want to incorporate digital products into your business model
To your Success.
