A couple of years ago, I came up with an idea to market myself. Since the world was moving toward a more digital product platform, I decided it was time I gave it a shot. I collated a number of my articles, the columns I had written, created PDF formats of my work, and Kindle versions as with an objective to do a little marketing. Slowly and gradually, it gained momentum and popularity. So much so, that it sold hundreds of copies, and I earned a huge revenue from it. The PDF guide was about SEO and Google Ranking but now I’m publishing everything here on my blog for free.
Despite this achievement, I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself a subject matter expert on buying and selling the digital media and its subsequent products. But….
Now, Let’s get started…
So far, we have observed as a trend, so many upcoming entrepreneurs are creating profitable businesses. How? They use a solid foundation of digital products that operate on extremely high margins, which tend to increase and enhance the profitability index.
Digital products have become increasingly popular with the younger generation, especially because of its accessible and straightforward nature. Products like e-books, online courses, audiobooks and products, templates that are readily available, software ramp-ups, etc., are profitable and easy to make. They are attractive because of the cost of their creation is low and not time-consuming. They are also very scalable and editable from time to time as and when required.
Read Here – How To Choose The Best Affiliate Marketing NICHE For Beginners?
In today’s world, we are experiencing new e-commerce businesses and websites coming every day. It is becoming increasingly competitive, and companies use every trick in the book to make it more viable than another. As time passes, we will experience even more growing traffic and newer websites coming up.
Initially, when marketing came up, it was more of a banner sticking, pamphlet, and flyers handing out the mechanism that it operated on. The next step came in the form of affiliate websites, banner ads, and featuring sponsored content from different brands. These are all good ideas in terms of strategy, but they don’t hold much water in a futuristic and long-term approach.
How To Create A Digital Product?
First, you must consider how you want to sell the products that you have created on a digital platform. Once you have identified a valuable skill set and topic, you need to package it into a do it yourself online courses. For example, if you are an industry expert in say, design. You can design templates, ready to print, customisable templates that you can put up. Students, junior designers, etc can download these templates. people want a visual and accelerated learning experience today. Whatever is quick, helpful, and convenient is of mass appeal to them.
Digital Products is the most attractive way to sell your products to an audience that really appreciates your niche skillset. Reason? Digital products are extraordinarily scalable and compact to package and sell online. They also have zero cost associated with them except for the time that you put in making them. After that, they are a money-making machine provided they have received the right kind of packaging and marketing to make them accessible and set a trend that is here to stay.
For a website, bringing in customers is also a huge task. Most sites struggle in bringing in clientele. They suffer because of bad marketing and no niche product to cement the future of their website with the users.
There is a fascinating book by Tim Ferriss called the 4-hour workweek. In this book, Tim states that “products that deliver information are cost-effective, less time consuming and extremely quick to manufacture. They are also difficult for competition to duplicate.” Digital products are a prime source of milk for budding and upcoming entrepreneurs to make a successful and long-lasting name for themselves in a particular business.
For every successful venture, there is a lot of effort and hard work to be put in. Let me guide you through my eight steps that will give you an insight into how to launch profitable digital products.
Validate Your Digital Product Idea
Always validate your product idea with what the world wants. There are many times, and people go horribly wrong in this basic need. They invest hours of work and effort and finally realize that they have created a product that no one actually wants to see or buy. It is of no one’s interest, and all the work you have put in, goes down the drain, leaving you frustrated and failed.
Always have a good research plan before you delve into execution. Use Google trends to check what is it that is trending or clicking with people at a relatable level. Once you enter keywords that are specific to your domain, you will get a result of the popularity of that phrase with respect to Google Trends. It will also show you the popularity of that particular keyword or phrase over a period of time.
Set Up A Waiting List
Always create some drama. People love waiting and anticipating. Build up is what appeals, and curiosity sparks that extra interest in what’s going on. Create a list of people or audience you want to target. Put together a mailer of a kind with just a snapshot of what you want on the landing page of your website. An email list is an excellent asset to carry around, especially if you are looking to drive traffic onto your page. Increasing your traffic, whether or not your product is good, helps in activating your website to get better hits. If your product is good and no one knows about it, it still is a waste of time creating a product that no one will be able to see and access if they don’t have any knowledge of it.
Create a simple landing page. This helps is gauging if people are showing interest and exploring further in terms of your online course concept, or service, or videos and are willing to give you their details for you to contact them further or not.
Start Building Your Audience With Free Content
When you create a landing page on the website, you are allowing people to view basic content and leave you with their email addresses for signing up and collecting their basic data for further processing. You can first pique interest from customers like companies that may be interested, top brass brands, and also high-level influencers, by creating some top-notch content-rich feeds to your website. They may be interested in sharing your content with their references and spread it by word of mouth. The people that you target will be excellent prospects for publishing guest posts as well. For promoting guest distributions, you can use BuzzSumo to facilitate the same.
Today, the concept of guest posting has gathered momentum and emerges number one on solutions to increase waiting list data to drive digital content. Once you have determined your niche, you must also keep an eye out for other blogs that have a similar validation as your idea and blogs that are focussed on the same niche topic as yours. Analyze competition blogs. You can interact and pitch different ideas to them for related niche topic posts you could write. You have to ensure your topics are just similar to what the idea of the existing blog is. Not the entire blog itself. Content must be your own only.
Create Your Digital Product
Once you have a live website up and running, you basically have created enough customers and popularity. Now the main game is of traffic. For your product to keep going and ensure you have a steady inflow of traffic every day, you must concentrate on content that will bring attention to your site in the first few searches. How do you do that?
The goal at this point in your digital marketing threshold is that you start focussing your attention away from your personal content or guest posting or likes and shares, but move towards improving the quality in terms of readability and content, and the frequency of posts that appear on your website and subsequently on customer notifications. By now, you would have enough audience to justify and invest your time and energy in creating more frequent high content posts. Hence, focus on prioritizing your major and most important target keywords and keyword phrases. You can try inviting your audience to some pre-sold content or videos as a bonus affair.
The first and most important step is to create the material. The material you create is going to win your website launch and garner attention. Later, the same content can be spun in many ways and used over and over again.
For example, you are a trainer. You have a skill that benefits people in ways more than one. They will be happy to pay for it since they are getting the learning from your experience at the touch of their fingertips. Paid webinars, podcasts, live seminars, conferencing, virtual classrooms are all an upcoming concept that is also easily monetized. When you sell products, keep in mind the store details, check out pages, payment gateways where the customers’ sensitive information is involved. Carefully plan and execute the buying process.
Listen To Your Feedbacks And Tweak Your Product
Any product, whether digital or not, has to have a feedback from its customer. Good, bad, ugly, great; either way, the feedback mechanism has to be in place. Why? Your product has to evolve with your audience and the incoming and existing trends. It is also much easier to upgrade and keep making necessary changes to a digital product than a physical product to whom making changes becomes extremely cumbersome and challenging. When you keep updating a digital product, it brings a different value to it since the customer sees that he is getting an up to date product for which he is paying. It is always about continually adding value to an already good product.
In terms of handling an online course, always run your course through a beta group. It is better you implement this initiative in your creation phase instead of doing it later and making more changes. You can also interest people in a prelaunch for your student audience. They can give you some testimonials before you show it off and launch it to the rest of the world.
Install The Right Monetization Tools On Your Website
Once you are at a stage where you want the monetary part for your website to be implemented, you must take the utmost care that it is a smooth and error-free process. A couple of things that can help you achieve your goal are:
- OptimizePress is a high-level WordPress template. It ensures high-quality landing pages and good blog content.
- Zippy Courses is a basic yet interesting WordPress theme that can host your course content and envelope it into a gated community
- Selz is an excellent embeddable widget that enables you to sell digital products and enables your website to process transactions from your website directly.
- SumoMe, allows you to make an email list and also captures email lists quite well and helps you to welcome all your list users to your community.
- KingSumo Headlines helps us to sort out your headlines and optimize them and gives your users a better insight into learning and the content that relates most to your audience.
- AddThis creates small buttons of your social media handles on the website and helps your users to share your website content on their sites and to other friends and colleagues.
Launch To Your Loyal Viewers And Expand Your Online Business From There
Launching any digital product is only the beginning, If you want to scale and make this business as a passive income source then you have to learn online marketing.
There are thousands of ways to market your digital product. You can buy Shoutouts, Send Emails to your list, hire SEO expert to rank your product on popular buying keywords, Social media promotion, Guest posts and Display ads (Google Adwords or FB Ads) etc…
Conclusion
In the end, You should continue learning, testing and make sure to multiply your success until you are ready to start your next digital products for your audience. Your new product should be related to your audience needs and Feedback.
After that, It’s time to start this process all over again to make more money online with your digital product.
If there’s anything you think I’ve missed – talk to me in the comments below!
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Nice article ….keep it up 😊
Thankyou Anant…!!!