Wondering how to make money selling digital products? Digital products are great for affiliates. They pay more in commissions because there’s no postage or handing costs. Those savings can be passed on to the third parties who promote them (affiliates).
That’s why digital products pay between 30% and 40% commissions, compared with 1%-10% for the typical physical affiliate product. With such a low level of commission, it can be much harder to run advertising and come out with a profit. High ticket digital products especially give you a much larger amount of “wiggle” room for learning paid ad methods.
There’s other ways to sell digital products too – here’s a few of the most common methods of selling products online.
How To Make Money Selling Digital Products – Finding Products To Sell
One of the first places new affiliate marketers will look for products is Clickbank.com. Clickbank is one of the largest marketplaces for digital products. But you’ll also find them on Click2sell and JVzoo.com. There’s thousands of products to choose from too so your choice of product is important as some of them sell better than others.
Ideally choose a product which is aligned in some way with your interests or hobbies. This is important because unless you love your online business it’s going to be harder to work at it. Loving your products is a good place to start. If you don’t love your product, it’s going to be harder to persuade others how great they are too!
Once you’ve found a suitable product to sell, you’re going to need to learn a marketing strategy to get eyes on your product. You’ll need to join the associated affiliate program connected to the product you want to sell. Then you can access your dashboard and get your unique affiliate link. Most programs also offer marketing materials too, such as banners and images you can use in your marketing.
How To Make Money Selling Digital Products – Selling
Selling online is done through various marketing methods such as:
- PPC – pay per click marketing platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook, YouTube etc.
- Content creation – blogging and video blogging (v’logging) are two content marketing strategies. Attract traffic for free from social media and the search engines.
- Social media marketing methods allow affiliate marketers to connect with online users and direct them to their products
- Email marketing is one of the best ways to promote digital products online
- Offline methods – traditional forms of advertising such as banners, newspaper advertisements and so on
One of the fastest ways to sell digital products is through using paid marketing to drive targeted traffic towards a landing page. Here the marketer collects email addresses and automates an email marketing campaign.
Why Use Email Marketing?
Email marketing is one of the best ways to selling online, particular with digital products. Since digital products are often slightly more vague than their physical counterparts, it can be more difficult to convey their value to potential customers. A physical product is different.
You know what you’re getting. But courses and trainings are slightly more obscure in that the customer doesn’t always see the value. With email marketing, you have the opportunity of capturing the email of a potential customer. Then you can follow up with email messages over a long period of time. This time can be used to build a relationship with them and inform them about your product/s.
This is much more difficult on a website where most visitors only stick around for a few minutes.
Finding Your Target Audience For Online Selling
One of the fundamental principles of online selling is finding your target audience. Since most of the online users aren’t going to want what you’re selling, the more specifically you can define who it is you’re selling to, the easier you’ll be able to make those sales. If you try and sell to everyone online, you’re wasting your time!
To define your target audience you need to know who is going to be most interested in buying your product. Many would love to, but can’t afford it. Many won’t see the benefit and some will only be a timid browser of your digital shop! You want specific buyers who already have their wallets out and desperately want what you’re selling. To find these “hot” buyers online you need to understand who they are and what they’re looking for.
For example, a product review is a piece of content which attracts a “hot” buyer. A “How To” guide is something which attracts someone not wanting to buy anything, but wanting some free information, perhaps.
Find High Value Products
There’s thousands of products to choose from, so how do you know which one to sell? High value products are the best since they pay the most. Subscription and high ticket items for example. With a subscription product you can earn substantially more than with a one off sale, which only pays once. Subscription business tools, for example are good because the end user needs them to run a business. So they are likely to maintain their subscriptions for years to come.
Training and mentorship courses too offer high value to people wanting to transition out of traditional employment into the digital business space. So these are good products to promote. Learn more about building an online business here.
With a high value offering, you don’t need as many sales to become profitable either. Low value physical products pay much less than high ticket digital ones. So you’ll need to shift products in high volume in order to make money. With a single high ticket item, or several subscription sales, you can earn a lot more and with fewer customers.
