Hundreds of guides on selling digital products like eBooks, templates, and coaching exist. However, the market can be saturated. The not-so-secret secret to success is niching down, finding leads who value your products, and learning how to reach out to them.
In this blog, we go over:
- Types of digital products
- How to niche down and find your audience in saturated markets
- Best platforms for selling digital products
What Are The Best Digital Products You Can Sell?
There’s no limit to how many digital products you can sell. You just have to find the right digital product and the people willing to buy them.
But if you’re still unsure about what to sell, here are some of the best digital products to consider:
Online Courses
You can learn just about anything online, but there’s a lot of information to sift through. A more streamlined approach is to take an online course.
If you’re selling online courses, be specific about what you’re trying to teach and create a course that seamlessly transitions from one topic to another.
Include activities that your audience can engage with. Ensure these activities align with the courses’ overall goals.
For example, if you’re selling a backlink-building course, one of the main activities should include getting a backlink from an authoritative site.
eBooks
There are dozens of free eBook creators online you can use. All you need to spend making an eBook is time. Once you sell it on the market, you can continue generating income without writing it again. But you still have to spend money on marketing your eBook.
When creating your eBook, ensure you provide in-depth value that stands out from the free content on the topic you’re trying to write about. Once you have more insights, you can sell an updated version or give it away free as an add-on.
Memberships
Membership subscriptions can be a source of recurring monthly revenue. They’re also a place to build your community around a specific niche. Members get a sense of exclusivity, and a positive feedback loop within your members' community can foster brand loyalty.
Examples are YouTube channels with tiered membership subscriptions, Patreons, Discord channels, or membership-based websites. Subscribers expect to see better content than the ones available for free online.
Some YouTubers with Patreon subscribers offer advanced releases of their following videos, behind-the-scenes footage, or bonus content. Other memberships include being a part of a community where you can network.
Templates
Templates make things easier and more convenient. The best part is you can create templates for multiple niches or industries. For example, you can create resumes, spreadsheets, or sales email templates.
Presets are also an example of templates for things like Photoshop, lightroom, or music production. Users don’t have to spend hours tinkering with the settings. They just have to use your templates and adjust them to match their preference.
However, templates are straightforward to steal. Reinforcing copyright might be difficult. You can also be susceptible to copyright infringement. So, aside from marketing and other overhead costs of selling, consider the potential legal issues that come with making templates.
Digital Services
Digital services like social media marketing, graphic design, or SEO are essential to all businesses. If you’re selling digital services, you can work remotely and look for clients globally.
But to get clients, you’d have to start thinking of marketability. Ensure you have a website or portfolio to showcase your previous work. You should also have testimonials, reviews, and data to support your claims.
Create content marketing assets to attract inbound leads. That means being active on social media, LinkedIn, or having a blog around your niche. If you want to be proactive, you can start cold email outreach to contact leads that can get the most value out of your digital services.
Coaching
Your goal as a coach is to help clients achieve their full potential and make positive changes in their lives, health, relationships, or careers.
For example, you can be an online fitness coach who helps clients be more accountable for their diet, creates workout programs, and ensures they progress toward their goals.
There’s also a market for high-level coaching for businesses. Some coaches teach businesses how to execute go-to-market strategies; others offer frameworks they can follow to streamline their sales process.
How to Sell Digital Products Using Email Marketing
Email marketing is perfect for selling digital products like digital services or SaaS. You can directly contact high-quality prospects, scale faster and more cost-effectively than traditional marketing methods, and it’s something you can easily personalize and automate.
If you want to sell digital products using email marketing, here is a step-by-step rundown of what you need to do:
Technical Setups, Domains, and Authentication
Cold email outreach requires some technical considerations, which can be confusing, especially for non-tech-savvy people. But with Instantly’s new DFY (done-for-you) service, manual setups are a thing of the past.
Instantly can handle technical setups, including DMARC, DKIM, SPF, DNS, and Forwarding. You can buy domains directly from Instantly and warm them up automatically. It’s also 20-30% cheaper, saving time and money.
Prospecting, Segmentation, and Qualification
With the technical setups taken care of, you can focus on finding quality prospects who will get the most value from your products or services. You can source leads through your lead capture pages or use lead finder tools like Instantly B2B Lead Finder.
With Lead Finder, you can filter leads that fit your exact ICP; segment leads based on specific demographics, or even look for prospects similar to your clients. You don’t even have to spend extra on email verification. All leads are pre-verified.
You can even qualify leads on the spot with Lead Finder using advanced search filters. For example, you can use the filters to find leads with specific job positions, tech stacks, or company sizes. Plus, the leads can be directly added to any Instantly campaign.
Cold Email Outreach Automation
Tools like Instantly can automate cold email outreach and follow-up campaigns for you. You just have to add the leads to your campaigns.
If you don’t know how to start your cold sales emails, Instantly has dozens of templates for different industries you can use. You can also use custom variables to personalize at scale.
Each Instantly campaign can contain several email variations. There’s also an option for enabling auto-optimization, which uses A/B testing to find your best-performing email variation.
Remember to clean your email lists regularly. Remove leads that aren’t responding or have already opted out. Doing so protects your deliverability and reputation.
Nurturing and Post-Purchase Support
Nurturing is when you provide leads with valuable information through your email. It helps build a lasting relationship and enables you to engage with leads in your list. Think of case studies, how-to guides, or freebies.
You should also continue nurturing leads after they purchase your product. Keep them in the loop for updates, offer additional content, and offer support when they need it.
Selling Digital Products Through SEO and Content Marketing
People looking for online courses, eBooks, or coaching want to learn. Before committing to a course, buying an eBook, or meeting with a coach, they will likely do their research.
That’s why SEO and content marketing are great for these digital products. These inbound marketing efforts make leads come to you.
You get to provide leads with value, establish yourself as an authority, and build trust with your audience. When leads decide to take the next step, they’ll have you at the top of their minds.
To collect lead info from SEO and content marketing traffic, consider creating gated content your audience can download in exchange for their email information.
Leveraging Social Media to Sell Digital Products
Social media is a great place to sell digital products, especially if it’s business-to-consumer (B2C). That’s why many people sell memberships, templates, or digital artwork directly to consumers on social media.
You don’t have to be aggressive with your marketing and use paid ads. If you don’t have the budget, organic social media marketing or social selling is always an option.
Remember that not every social media platform is the same. Some products work better when marketed on Instagram, some on TikTok, and others on Facebook.
Learn to leverage user-generated content. Engage with your audience on social media. Share helpful tips and present your products as the ultimate solution to pain points
Best Practices for Selling Digital Products Online
To ensure you’re optimizing and streamlining the way you’re selling digital products, here are some best practices to consider:
Brainstorm
You could sell any type of digital product. But the best kind of product you can sell is something you already have extensive knowledge of.
Think about what you’re passionate about. Are there pain points you’ve overcome using a specific strategy? Or do you have information or skills that others can find helpful?
Validate Your Ideas Through Market Research
Once you’ve found your “Eureka!” moment, validate your ideas with market research. This will help you determine if the digital product you’re trying to sell is in demand.
Market research should also include competitor research. Find out how saturated the market is. If it is saturated, it might be better to niche down.
Niche Down to Avoid Saturated Markets
You don’t want to sell in highly saturated markets. Always look for ways to niche down. There’s less competition and more chances of getting a sale.
For example, you’re trying to sell resume templates. To niche down, you can look into creating templates for specific job positions.
Find a Platform You Can Sell On
You can build an online store through Shopify, create an Etsy account, or simply sell on social media platforms. Ensure that the platform you’re on makes it convenient for customers to buy and pay for your digital products.
Once you have a platform, find ways to drive traffic, such as inbound marketing efforts like content marketing or outbound marketing like cold emails.
Leverage Inbound and Outbound Marketing
Inbound and outbound marketing helps sustain your sales pipelines. You can invest in SEO, content marketing, email marketing, or whatever strategy fits within your budget.
However, consider using lead finder tools like Instantly B2B lead Finder for your email marketing efforts to keep lead generation costs low.
Over to You
Learning how to sell digital products online can become lucrative. When you have a digital product, all that’s left is to sell it at scale.
Remember to do market research, validate your product ideas, and find the best way to market your digital products. To recap, here are popular ways of selling a digital product online:
- Social media marketing is best if your digital assets are aimed at individual consumers, such as memberships or templates.
- SEO and content marketing work best for digital products like coaching and online courses since they can attract leads doing research by targeting relevant keywords.
- Cold email marketing is best for digital services and SaaS because it can target leads that fit your exact ICPs, be automated, and be scaled at a low cost.
If you’re looking to sell digital products online through cold email marketing, there’s no better tool to help you scale and automate outreach than Instantly. Try it out for free today!
