While many people focus on display ads and affiliate marketing as website monetization strategies, selling digital products has rapidly grown to become one of the most lucrative ways to monetize your website.
You can use digital products as a standalone strategy or you can combine them with display ads and affiliate marketing to build diverse revenue streams.
➡️ In this post, we’re going to share a bunch of ideas, starting with looking at the most popular digital products that are being sold online.
Massive Open Online Course
➡️ We’ll then shift our focus to only the most unique and profitable digital products to sell online so that you can walk away from this with some actionable advice.
➡️ To cap it all off, we’ll provide a roundup of the best platforms to sell digital goods to give you some options to get the ball rolling.
According to data from merchants using Easy Digital Downloads (a platform for selling exclusively digital items), these are the most popular digital products to sell online
How To Start An Online Boutique Business (2023 Guide)
We know any old eBook won’t sell well; photography is an incredibly tough market; software could range from anything from B2B content management to golf course tee sheet software.
That’s why, in this article, we’re taking it beyond general “categories” and “product types” to explore some unique, high-profit, in-demand digital products to sell online.
One way to stand out in a crowded eBook market is by creating visually beautiful books that incorporate heavy usage of photos, illustrations, or graphic designs.
Top 50 Art Exhibitions Of 2022
These visually oriented eBooks usually require multiple skills and, therefore, don’t have as many people competing for the space: a vegan cookbook with tutorial pictures requires photography, writing, and cooking skills.
With the rise of dropshipping and print-on-demand, online merchants have a need for designs; not just any old designs, but those specifically made with merchandise in mind.
You may think it’s possible to slap any graphic design on a t-shirt or mug, but that’s far from the case. Merchandise designs have specific requirements:
Natural Skin Care Products Market Report, 2022 2030
The Vector Lab has evolved into such a successful business that you can find its designs in many merchandise stores you enter at National Parks, amusement parks, and local breweries.
From meditation to remote working, people want to listen to particular music to get in the mood, focus, or regain their energy.
However, free music is rarely curated for specific environments. You can find some on YouTube, but they’re chopped up by ads, often hit-or-miss in quality, and they rarely offer more than a few hours before you must search for another clip.
The Path To Purchase: Ecommerce Ux Best Practices
The Calm app sells a subscription with many elements, but one of its key components is curated music for sleep and meditation.
If you’ve recently purchased or hunted for a home, you may have seen new technologies like digital staging and 3D interior models. These models are surging in popularity due to their impeccable detail, interactivity, and relative affordability compared to walking through an entire building and filming every inch of it.
Many 3D models are entirely customized for their projects, but many professions use models, or templates, to get started. If you have the design skills, 3D models are wonderful digital products to sell online, especially to:
Complete List Of The 17 Art Schools In California
Shutterstock’s Turbosquid marketplace is filled with independent designers selling 3D models of buildings, landscapes, cities, and even more specific 3D models like automobiles, body parts (for medical fields), furniture, and technology.
The online course market primarily caters to those trying to gain skills. And that makes sense, considering a “course” is, most often, a learning experience.
Yet, there’s a part of the equation missing. There are several highly successful online teachers who focus on “understanding” rather than mastery or expertise.
The Lancet Global Health Commission On Financing Primary Health Care: Putting People At The Centre
Many of these online courses teach to the senior community, but there are other niches like travelers, ex-pats, or simply curious people who want a basic understanding of a topic.
These courses tend to cover societal shifts or entirely new/foreign technologies, ideas, or even topics that are interesting but not understood by the public.
Alexiei Dingli sells a successful online course on Udemy that helps school teachers gain a better understanding of artificial intelligence. This way, those same teachers can turn around and have intelligent conversations with their students about AI and AI tools or even teach about the topic.
Tattoo And Body Art
We can’t say for certain that finding digital products to sell online renders more profits than physical ones. However, we can look at the benefits of digital products to show that they’re often less risky, lower stress, and provide potential for higher profits.
With low upfront costs and minimal overhead, most of the money goes to you after each sale. The main thing you give up is the initial time required to make the digital product to sell online.
People tend to purchase digital products when they can’t afford something, or when it doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of money on something like in-person training or customized design. Therefore, you’re opening up your sales to the masses, not just those who can afford pricey services.
Best 6 Steps To Changing Careers And Becoming A Tattoo Artist
Selling a service is a great way to make money, but it means your livelihood is tied to time. Digital products sell on their own, even if you’re on vacation, get sick, or go to the bathroom.
With all good things, there are always downsides. Although we recommend seeking digital products to sell online, you must keep some disadvantages in mind:
It’s not entirely free to sell digital products. You must pay for necessary software to build the digital goods (like Photoshop for design or Ulysses for an eBook), and there are marketing and sales costs like hosting, domain names, payment processing fees, and customer support.
Affiliate Marketer: Definition, Examples, And How To Get Started
Customer support is one area of maintenance that digital product sellers often forget about. But you should expect to receive emails from your customers. In addition, you’ll probably have to update the digital products regularly: for example typos and outdated information in eBooks, or if you create an entire online course about Shopify, but then they go ahead and change the whole interface.
There are tools to prevent people from stealing your work, but it’s never foolproof. Much like ecommerce fraud, this is a risk that comes with selling online, so you should get the right tools to protect your work, and minimize any emotional responses when it does inevitably happen. Furthermore, think about having some sort of legal help on-call, just in case you need to take action.
From YouTube to pirated content, and free blogs to open-source software, you must constantly answer this question for customers: “Why would I pay you if I can get it for free somewhere else?” Luckily, you’ll have a nice selling proposition and a unique product.
The Real Cost Of Pink Tax
Many marketplaces have restrictions or all-out bans on digital products. It’s usually for a good reason, considering some marketplaces are only meant for in-person sales, or they don’t have the fraud protection in place for digital sales. For instance, Craigslist prohibits all sales of digital downloads. As does Facebook Marketplace (most social sites do). You’ll also find restrictions on places like eBay and Amazon. It’s not all doom and gloom though. We’re going to share with you the best places where to sell digital products in the next section below.
Once you decide upon which unique digital product to sell, you’ll need a reliable platform to do it. The following three happen to be among the best at building, showcasing, distributing, marketing, and selling different types of digital downloads.
Shopify is the go-to option when you’re looking for a simple way to create a full-fledged online store to sell your digital downloads.
I Started My Own Beauty Company—here's The Most Important Lesson I Learned
For building, managing, and growing all sorts of online businesses. You can register your domain, get hosting, create a digital product store from pre-built website themes, market the store, manage your orders, etc – all in one place and all without using any technical skills.
What makes it one of the best platforms to sell digital goods is its App Store, which offers thousands of apps that function as extensions to its platform. As you can imagine, with a selection that wide, you’re bound to find an app that supports whatever unique digital product you decide to sell.
Although the platform also has physical products for sale, there is plenty on offer from the realm of digital goods. So much so in fact, that in many ways Etsy can be thought of as the Amazon.com of the most profitable digital products. Their expansive marketplace connects online merchants to a global audience of nearly 100 million buyers per year, who in turn make purchases worth $13.5 billion
Trump Sells $99 Nft Trading Cards Of Himself, Confusing Allies
You just need to sign up as a vendor, set up an Etsy-hosted storefront, and add your inventory. Etsy will then handle order fulfillment on your behalf.
The best digital product examples on the platform include craft patterns, fonts, WordPress themes, eBooks, checklists, social media templates, business cards, journals, logos, worksheets, graphics, and printable artwork. Etsy essentially tries to help you monetize your passion by selling self-created digital goods.
The limit for your digital downloads is about 20 MB per file. But, you’re free to upload a wide range of file types – including .txt, .zip, .ePUB, .iBook, .stl, .mp3, .mpeg, .psp, .rtf, .bmp, .doc, .gif, .jpeg,
