The easiest way to make money with a blog is to sell digital products. If you do it right, you can get to six-figure profits pretty fast.
You only invest the time and effort required to create the blog and the digital products. There will be no manufacturing costs, no shipping fees, and no inventories to worry about.
This means that you can get a profit margin of up to 100%. It’s worth looking into, don’t you think?
Sure, it may all seem difficult at this point, because you have no idea where to start and how to handle the process.
The good news is that you are not alone. We are here to help, and we know all about blogging, selling digital products, and securing six-figure earnings.
We started our blog from scratch and brought it to over 30,000 net monthly profits. We learned everything by trial and error, the hard way, but you don’t have to.
In the following lines, we’ll teach you all there is to know about creating and selling digital products on your blog so that you too can start making six-figure profits and earn your financial freedom.
We’ve organized the whole process in 17 easy-to-follow steps, all detailed in the following lines.
17-Step Guide to Earning Six-Figures by Selling Digital Products on Your Blog
Since our promise is to take you from zero to six figures, we will assume you are starting from scratch and structure our advice accordingly.
If you have already taken some of the steps below, feel free to skip them.
However, keep in mind that our recommendations could still help you make sure you’ve covered everything and discover some valuable tools and advice.
Here’s what you should do in order to start earning six figures by selling digital products on your blog:
1. Learn to Think and Feel Like a Digital Product Creator and Seller
Indeed, this step does not involve specific actions to help you reach your goal. However, if you don’t understand what creating and selling digital products means from the beginning and what it takes to make it happen, you may never be able to do it successfully.
The first thing you need in order to start your online venture on the right foot is self-confidence. You need to be sure that you have something valuable to share (knowledge, experience, skills).
Also, you need to be confident in your ability to help others put your knowledge, experience, and skills to good use.
Then, you need trust that people will be willing to pay for what you have to offer. They will, simply because people appreciate the stuff they pay for more than they appreciate free stuff.
If you doubt it, look at teenagers who have received a brand new Mercedes as a gift, and compare their attitude with that of teenagers who have had to work hard and save for a second-hand car they could barely afford.
Teenagers in the former category act as if they ruled the world and the cars were rightfully theirs. They drive recklessly and often cause traffic accidents.
Teenagers who work hard and make sacrifices to buy their own cars are more appreciative and responsible. They care for their cars more, even when they bought them used, and they are more responsible drivers.
The same happens with information. When people receive it for free, they rarely take it seriously. When they have to pay for it, they instinctually value it more and pay more attention to it.
Implicitly, those who pay for advice will obtain better results applying it than those who receive the same advice for free.
To avoid doubts and gain self-confidence, it helps to choose a niche you know well, and create and sell digital products that answer a real, burning need. But we’ll discuss that in more details in the following lines.
2. Choose Your Niche or Industry
This decision will govern what you write about and what products you can sell. It will also influence the size of your market and the profile of your audience.
You should choose a field you are familiar with and curious to learn more about. This way, you will have something to offer and you will be doing something you like.
At the same time, it has to be in a profitable niche, one that draws interest and money. Otherwise, all your efforts could be in vain.
Some profitable niches for blogging and digital products are:
- Health
- Nutrition
- Relationships
- Personal finance
- Making money online
- Self-improvement
- Environment
Of course, there are many more niches that could be profitable with the right approach. To find the best one for you, we suggest you try the following:
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- Make a list of niches/industries that match your experience and interests
- Research them using Google Trends to see what Internet users are looking for these days
- Narrow down your list until you find the one niche you are most confident in and comfortable with.
3. Set Up Your Blog
We’re not going to waste any more of your time reviewing this step because we’ve already published a comprehensive step-by-step guide on how to do it. It will walk you through choosing your blogging platform, getting a domain name, setting up your web hosting with Bluehost using our special discount, choosing a theme, and blogging about it.
Click here to learn how to start your blog!
4. Build Your Story
It is true: online, you can be whoever you want to be. Our honest advice is to stay true to yourself and your readers.
Don’t invent a personality you cannot live up to, and don’t base your online business on lies. It will ruin your self-confidence.
Focus on what you know and do best, and be the person you’ve always wanted to be. Make sure that, if someone you know reads your blog you have nothing to hide or be ashamed of.
Be open about who you are, what you have to share, and how you plan on doing it, and be honest in your desire to help others.
People won’t trust stories that sound too good to believe and people who avoid to show their face or to share their name. Be yourself and be proud of who you are!
5. Build Relationships
Before you can sell digital products online, you have to earn your potential buyer’s trust. Why is trust so important?
Let’s say a good friend asks you for a loan. You will lend them the money, of course. Why? Because you know them and you trust them to pay you back.
If a complete stranger asked you for the money, you would surely refuse. Why? Because you have no idea who they are and whether they would pay you back.
As a digital product seller and creator, you are the person asking for your blog readers’ money. If you want them to give it to you, it is important that you earn their trust first.
You need to show them you know your game and you live up to your promises. They need to be sure that your digital products will answer their needs and expectations.
How do you do that? You need to post helpful information on your blog, by sharing your knowledge for free.
If you’re not sure how to approach blogging, our FREE 5-day blogging e-course will surely help. Sign up for it using the form on the right, and you’ll learn how to blog at your own pace, from the comfort of your home or office!
6. Build an Email List
As you’re earning your readers’ trust and engagement with your content, encourage them to sign up for even more helpful content, and entice them to do so with free content or some other perks.
It is important to keep in touch with them and reach out to them when you have something to share or sell, and email messages are a great way to do that.
7. Spruce Up Your Blog
Starting a blog is easy. Making it look professional, convincing Google that it deserves a high rank in SERPs, and drawing and engaging traffic are elements of a completely different story.
In theory, posting helpful information on your blog regularly should help you convince not only your readers but also Google. In practice, Google uses limited algorithms that can’t see your passion and desire to help.
Therefore, you need to give them what they want, namely strategic use of keywords, backlinks, readability, originality, and more. It may seem difficult, but we’ve got you covered at this step as well.
Since you want your readers to love you and spread the word on your work independently of your rank in Google, our FREE 3-day blogger brush-up course should come in handy as well.
8. Get Ideas for Your Digital Products
Now you have a blog for selling digital products and an audience to sell them to. It is time to start garnering ideas for the products themselves.
Here’s the deal: in order for your products to sell, they need to answer an immediate need, to help buyers.
You can guess what products would do that and hope your audience will need them and agree to pay for them, or you can ask your audience what they need.
In his speech at the 2016 Affiliate World Conferences, Neil Patel gave some great advice on creating digital products.
Perhaps the most important part was that you should find out what people really want and need. You need to discover what would make them empty their wallet to you.
If you already have a solid audience, you can ask them directly. If you don’t, tools like SurveyMonkey can help you obtain the answers you need.
Finally, if you’re not comfortable with the answers or you’d like more input, you can ask your social media contacts or your friends and relatives.
Just be open to suggestions, and don’t try to influence the outcome. If you want to really sell digital products online, you have to give people what they need, not what you think or hope they do.
9. Choose the Type of Digital Products You Wish to Create
Now you know what needs your digital products should answer. How you answer them is entirely up to you.
Depending on your experience and skills, you can create any or all of the following types of digital products:
- Ebooks
- Software
- Videos/Slide Shows
- Audio (including music)
- Photos
- Graphics
- Reports
- Courses
- Services
- Apps
As a general rule, keep in mind that today’s internet users appreciate visuals. Therefore, if you decide to create an eBook, don’t hesitate to include photos, graphics, and/or illustrations.
Depending on your niche and product specific, it might be a good idea to make the product available in several formats and let your buyers choose the one they find more convenient.
10. Create Your Digital Product
This step often seems overwhelming, especially to those taking it for the first time. Here’s an insider trick: Instead of looking at the big picture, take baby steps.
You already know the product. It’s in your head. It’s the expression of your experience and knowledge.
Rewind time and place yourself in your buyers’ shoes. If you shared their need and interests, knowing what you know now, what would be the first thing you would do?
Start from there, and continue gradually, presenting every step, providing any advice you consider helpful, and focusing on making everything as simple, clear, and easy to follow as possible.
Here are a few aspects you should consider:
- Your digital product should appeal to anyone, no matter how experienced or inexperienced. If that is not possible, perhaps you can create separate versions for beginners and advanced.
- Take into account possible refund requests. For example, if you’re creating a guide on accomplishing a certain goal, make followers work for the results, and let the process last a little more than the one month within which they could ask for the refund. Unfortunately, some people will request refunds even though the digital product they bought served its purpose.
- Don’t promise the moon and the sky. Indeed, you need to convince people to buy, but if you create unrealistic expectations, everyone will be disappointed.
11. Test Your Product
Let’s be honest: you can’t be objective about the stuff you create, just as writers can’t edit their own work because they’ll see what they wanted to write and not what actually came out.
To make sure your digital product is really valuable, have it tested by a friend or someone you trust to be honest. If you really trust your product, turn its testing into a marketing strategy, and organize a contest – the winners will be able to test it for free or buy it at half-price.
If you receive negative feedback, don’t ignore it. Use it to improve your digital product before launching it and, thus, avoid negative reviews. If your first product is successful, it will help you sell and promote other digital products as well.
Let’s say you’re selling digital products on Amazon, namely ebooks through Kindle Direct Publishing. If you have a couple of people read your ebook before it goes online, you can use their feedback to improve it.
It could mean shortening some phrases, going in-depth with some details, or removing some irrelevant data.
If you ignore the feedback and you publish your eBooks in their original format, you risk receiving negative reviews.
Who do you think will spend money on an eBook rated 2/5 stars and deemed useless? Probably no one!
12. Price Your Digital Product
After creating and before selling digital products, you’ll need to set a price for them. It means deciding how much to charge for it so as to cover your costs and make your efforts worth it.
In his above-cited speech, Neil Patel makes an interesting case: the higher the price, the fewer products you’ll have to sell in order to reach your six-figures target.
However, in order to charge the $1,000 he recommends as a price, you’d have to live up to his performances and guarantee the type of results he can bring about for his clients, in your own niche, of course.
When setting your price, you have to assess:
- How much your target customers would be willing to pay in order to have their needs answered
- How much your product is really worth
- What price would help you win over your competitors without selling your products too cheap
We suggest you research your competitors, draw the line on your expenses and expected income, and set a price you feel comfortable with and consider fair. You can adjust it later on or improve your strategy when creating and selling more digital products.
13. Make Your Product More Attractive by Adding Bonuses
If you want your digital product to really sell, you need to make the offer irresistible, to convince potential buyers that they’ll be getting much more than their money’s worth. Don’t hesitate to share just how much more.
For example, if you’re creating an eBook, you could accompany it with a cheat sheet or a video course that takes the advice in the book even further. If you’re creating a video course, you could add a free 1-on-1 live training session to it.
As you promote your digital products, show your customers that they’d be getting several products at the price of one. Show them how much money they would be saving, or, better yet, how much money they could make by following your advice.
14. Choose Your Market
One of the best solutions for selling digital products is to do it directly. By having direct contact with the buyer, you can get free feedback and prepare the ground for upsells.
However, there’s a limit to how many sales you can finalize on your own. If you want to make big money, an even better alternative would be selling your digital products on Amazon.
Finally, you can pay others a percentage of your digital product’s price and let them promote it and sell it for you.
Those others could be affiliate marketers who find your products on Amazon, Clickbank or other networks. They could also be your direct buyers.
Take the example of Airbnb or cashback websites, which reward their users for inviting their contacts and intermediating further sales or transactions.
You can do the same, by offering your clients loyalty points, free credit, or discounts for future digital products in exchange for them intermediating sales of your current products.
15. Spread the Word on the Social Media
According to Pew Research Center, most adult Americans use social media. YouTube seems to be the most popular network, used by 73% of survey responders, followed closely by Facebook (68%), Instagram (35%), and Pinterest (29%).
This means most of your target customers are on social media. You cannot afford to neglect this opportunity to promote your digital products.
The least you can do is create YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram accounts, and let your target audience know what you have to offer. To be successful, make sure you adjust your posts to the specific of the network.
It goes without saying that you will need videos for YouTube and combinations of photos, slideshows, and text for Facebook and Instagram.
Make sure you add a social media plugin to your blogging platform, so that you and your readers may share the content you publish with ease.
Also, don’t resume your posts to advertising your digital products. Interact with your audience, initiate conversations, encourage them to ask questions and share their thoughts and ideas.
Although Facebook ads no longer pay the results they used to, they can still be a great way to promote digital products. Run a couple of campaigns and monitor their results to determine if they are worth the cost.
If you play your cards right, the social networks can become an important source of sales for your products and traffic for your blog.
16. Promote and Sell Your Digital Products
Your blog is your marketplace, the place where you connect with your customers and affiliates. You should use it to build anticipation for your digital products before they’re ready.
Don’t hesitate to post an announcement, write presentation articles, post updates on the creation process, and stir buyers’ curiosity with short stories and anecdotes.
If you play your cards right, you could be selling your products before actually having them ready. One way of doing that is to challenge your readers to test their unfinished versions for a much lower price and provide feedback.
Even if the feedback is not what you wanted, you can show you aim for perfection and don’t mind improving where necessary.
You should never be ashamed to talk about your work and your digital products. On the contrary, you should bring them up whenever you have a chance and show your passion and commitment to quality and results.
Remember those email addresses you gathered at the previous steps? It is time to put them to good use as well. ConvertKit can help with that.
As its name suggests, it can help you convert your blog readers into digital product buyers. All you need are a couple of well-written email sequences.
ConvertKit will help you make sure they reach the right people and trigger the desired responses.
Remember to keep your emails short and simple, and wrap your offer into benefits your readers won’t be able to resist.
Also, build a sense of urgency, by creating timed offers and countdowns and making readers feel they will be losing money if they don’t act immediately.
Follow this link to benefit from an exclusive 14 days free trial of ConvertKit!
17. Follow-up and Upsell
At this point, you’ve surely managed to secure at least a few sales of the digital products you’ve created. But why settle for just those sales?
You already have a base of customers who know have tested your products and know their worth. You also know how to create even more valuable products.
You can start promoting them before they’re actually ready.
Let’s say your digital product is an eBook on Staying Fit and Healthy during Pregnancy. You’ve just sold another copy.
No matter how effective your advice is, the buyer, after giving birth, will still have a couple of pounds to lose and will need to strengthen her abs and get rid of her baby belly.
Why let her leave hoping she would continue to look for advice on your blog when you can set an autoresponder and send her an email message in which you:
- Thank her for buying your digital products
- Assure her of all your support and willingness to answer any questions about the product and its use
- Give her the unique chance to obtain the guide or video course you’re currently working on – How to Lose the Baby Belly by Working out Only 10 Minutes a Day?
This strategy will not only increase your customers’ satisfaction level and decrease the risks of them asking for a refund, but it can also help you secure more sales for your future digital products.
Are You Ready to Create and Sell Your First Digital Products?
We know how challenging creating and selling digital products for the first time can be. You don’t think you can do it, and a voice keeps telling you that you’ll fail. Well, our goal is to help you overcome your fears and follow your dreams.
Digital products are not that difficult to create and sell. All you need is some guidance, which we gladly provide through this guide and the rest of our blog posts, some hard work, and commitment.
Follow the steps described above, ask for our help if you get stuck, and don’t hesitate to share your results. We promised to help you go from zero to six-figure profits by selling digital products on your blog, and we won’t stop until we see you there!
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