Selling digital products in 2024 — how to choose the right product and where to sell it

Sooner or later, every digital creator will experience a time when business is slow – this might happen at different points of the year, but it happens to all of us. One of the ways you can address this is by continuously looking for new clients to maintain a steady income. An additional method, which, in all honesty, is a dream scenario for a lot of creators, is finding ways to get passive income through selling digital downloads.

You might think “easier said than done”, and you’re not wrong. But if you spend some time figuring out what digital products to sell and where, passive income will start rolling in.

How to make digital downloads people want to buy

Brainstorm ideas of what you want to sell online

The starting point in this digital product journey of yours will depend on a few factors. It largely comes down to how high of a reach and recognition you have as an online creator.

It’s a good idea to consider – what can I teach my target audience, either in my existing niche or a complementary one?

There’s a memorable quote from Brandon Timothy, a popular YouTuber and digital product creator, who said about ideating digital downloads: “Look at bigger categories and see if you can find any submarket that you can focus on”.

To put this into practice, let’s say that you’re a nutritionist who has a couple thousand followers on Instagram. For example, you’ve consulted hundreds of clients or even organized online health events and have a solid community. You would have a relatively easy entry point in the health and fitness category, right? These folks could potentially be interested in buying things like:

• an ebook with recipes
• meal tracking, printable templates
• a self-paced, online course around a specific diet.

Other times, the idea will sort of present itself to you – for example, in our work as full-time freelancers in the content marketing niche, we uncovered that a lot of companies don’t know how to properly fill out project briefs. This showed us that we could offer a new service, i.e., online training that teaches how to communicate the company’s objectives and project goals to external partners.

Got your ideas written down? Perfect, now’s the time to check if the ‘promising’ ideas can be backed by more than your gut feeling.

Validate the product-market fit for your digital goods

After getting a rough idea of what digital products you could create and sell, it’s now time for some due diligence, to check the product-market fit. You can approach it in numerous ways:

Visit forums and social groups including Reddit, Quora, Facebook, Slack, etc. They can be a goldmine of insights – it’s where people share their personal stories, and talk about their problems, hoping to find a solution. All you have to do is a bit of Googling to find a relevant thread.
For example, if you’re a graphic designer wanting to sell printable or digital templates in the productivity category, you can tap a term like “planning template reddit” and you’ll come across posts like the one below:

You can quickly figure out that there is a need for “a time schedule template for planning a day” and that people, especially students, would be willing to pay for a ready-made one. Users will also tell you what an ideal template should look like.

Run a quick keyword research. Use a keyword research tool like Keysearch or Semrush to quickly check how many people look for terms related to your idea. This will give you a good overview of how many people might be interested in buying your digital download.

Talk to people who might be within your target audience. Sometimes the best way to verify an idea is simply by talking to people who might be interested in your offer. This can be someone from your circle – maybe someone you used to work with or a friend. Run your idea through them and ask for feedback over coffee or lunch. You could also post a question in a relevant social media or Slack group and ask members for feedback or help, like Stephanie Inabo did in the Superpath Slack community.

Spy on your competitors – be different, be better!

Before you start to sell digital content online, it’s worth checking whom you’ll have to compete with. Your competitors might become one of your greatest sources of inspiration.

Have you heard of Ben Goodey? He’s one of our favorite SEO experts who runs the How The Fxck podcast. He shares the SEO knowledge he has acquired throughout the years on LinkedIn and YouTube – and his approach is totally different from others.

His communication is bold, and he dives deep into SEO, a lot deeper than the majority of SEO courses and experts – his tips are actionable and always baked by numbers. No wonder he has gained a significant LinkedIn following of over 40k.

Check where your competitors fall short, and where they do well, and try to be even better! You can also check what people say about their products to get a good understanding of customer expectations.

Decide on the right format for your digital product

Sometimes, you’ll already know what format to use due to the type of digital product (it’s pretty obvious that you’d want to sell a Zumba workout course as a video, right?).

Other products might potentially work in multiple formats, so you’d have to consider if it should be audio, video, text, or other.

If that’s the case, what did your research so far reveal? Is there a format that other creators seem to prefer for this type of product? If the answer is ‘yes’, then you can treat this as a hint that it works for the target audience.

Here are a few examples to give you a sense of the different formats you can use to sell digital content online:

• Editable spreadsheets. You can create a digital download spreadsheet with formatting and formulas. For example, if you’re a personal finance coach, you could create a three-month savings plan with separate expense sheets for each month.
  Pro tip: You could sell this digital file as a standalone digital product, or as part of a bundle – for example, part of a monthly subscription to your services.
• Editable doc files. Like spreadsheets, documents can offer a template your clients can fill out or use as the basis of their work, hobby, or goals.
• PDF file. This can not only work for ebooks but also printable products like digital art, board games, etc.
• Access to web-based products, like customizable Notion templates, knowledge base frameworks, or even editable graphic elements like filters, frames, and icons.

Now that we’ve sorted out ‘what’ you’d like to sell, let’s see where to offer it to both get more sales and offer a great shopping experience.

What is the best way to sell digital content online?

There are two types of places – the ones you control in terms of your offer, messaging, customer data and communication, and external marketplaces and sites.

The good news is you don’t have to choose one over the other, so you can sell digital content online across multiple channels to get to as many potential clients as possible.

Your owned channels

[fs-toc-omit]Your website

Selling digital products through your website is the absolute best method for more reasons than one. If you’re tentative about it, then here are some strong arguments:

• everything in your online store is within your control – how you speak to your audience, what your website looks like, what price points or discounts you want to offer, etc.
• your digital products aren’t sold right next to your competitors – this means fewer distractions and potentially lower cart abandonment.
• you’re collecting information on your clients first-hand – what products they like the most, what goals they have, and even on-site behavior if that’s what you’d like to see. All this information will help you create better products in the future.

Selling directly to your customers through your ecommerce website allows you to build relationships with them over time, and drives your ability to easily sell through other marketing channels, too.

Of course, creating a website takes a while. Let alone, converting it into an online store, which isn’t something that can be done overnight. Seemingly, you only have a few options:

• setting up a store yourself if you have the tech skills,
• working with a developer, or
• using an ecommerce platform like Shopify and paying a fee for it.

What you might not be aware of though is that there is a fourth option – using Easycart to instantly turn your website into an online store. It’s as simple as adding a cart functionality to your site along with a “buy now” button, which takes the customer to a one-page shopping experience.

Better yet, you can also use Easycart to sell products through your social media channels or emails.

[fs-toc-omit]Social media channels

It’s difficult to find a brand or a digital creator who doesn’t sell their product on social media – and it’s hardly surprising since pretty much everyone is there. And if a social media platform goes down (looking at you Meta and Instagram), most of us start panicking – this only shows how big of a role social media plays in our lives.

Selling digital products online via social media is much easier if you have a decent following – you can create an Insta Story to promote it or write a catchy post, and you’ll get reactions.

But what if your organic reach is limited? You could either work towards building a wider following on LinkedIn, Tik Tok, or Instagram – depending on what you're selling, and who the target audience is – by producing relevant content, or run targeted ads.

Alternatively, you might team up with a digital creator who has more followers than you, and a similar target audience but isn’t your direct competitor. Ask them to promote your digital download on their profile. Naturally, you’ll have to return the favor at some point.

[fs-toc-omit]Email marketing

Think emails and newsletters are so 2000-and-late? If so, you’ll be surprised to know that they’re experiencing a renaissance. Consumers say they now distrust salesy content on social media and prefer reading product newsletters from vetted creators and brands. So, if you don’t have a mailing list yet, it’s time to start building one.

Among others, emails are perfect when releasing a new digital product or launching a limited-time discount. With the right tool, you can even create a timer that would count down the time to the premiere of your downloadable or the end of a promo. Plus, you could also send out a gentle reminder to those who didn’t finalize their purchase and left your product pending in the cart. All this shows emails through a pair of new lenses, right?

Third-party channels

[fs-toc-omit]Marketplaces

If you’re looking for an additional channel for selling digital products online, or you don’t have an alternative, then you could consider an online marketplace like Creative Market (or any other, as there are hundreds of them). They offer broad visibility and have built-in audiences but there is a downside. These platforms often charge fees and impose restrictions on branding and customer data access, i.e., they get to decide what customer insights you see. Additionally, increased competition can make it harder to stand out.

If you decide to sell digital content online via your website then you gain full control over branding and customer relationship, but you’ll have to put more effort into marketing. Not only will you have to design and build your web, but also ensure good SEO positioning.

We think it’s best to have your sales and marketing under control, so while it’s OK to start with a marketplace, you should aim at selling digital downloads from your own domain.

[fs-toc-omit]Popular SaaS tools

We’d bet you a $100 that SaaS platforms would be the last place you’d think of when wondering how to sell digital downloads. While this category doesn’t apply to all content creators, it’s a surprisingly effective channel.

The thing is, some online tools source digital elements or entire products from online creators. This lets them grow their library, while you earn commission when a customer purchases your product. As you’re not receiving 100% of the earnings, you need to do things for this to work:

1. find a massively popular platform, which gets a lot of traffic, and
2. find a category that isn’t as saturated with products similar to yours, but has high market demand.

A great example is Canva, which allows you to upload your digital assets and sell them to Canva users. Some creators put together presentation templates, calendars, or even single elements like filters, and earn a decent amount.

The upsides here are that it’s a one-off effort – if the product is popular, you’ll see money come in. You can also create multiple variations of the same template or element and sell them as separate products to grow your chances of sales. Sometimes all you have to do is change the color or text, and you can add it to a different category.

The downsides however are the same as in other third channels – your income becomes dependent on an external platform. If it shuts down, your revenue channel will dry out.

In our opinion, while this can be a nice side hustle, it shouldn’t lie at the core of your digital product sales. Even if you use these tools for extra money, you should simultaneously invest in building your brand and creating a community of buyers.

How to make digital downloads – and sell them

Regardless of where you end up making the most money from selling digital products, remember to build your brand consistently. The more credibility and recognition you have, the higher the probability that your digital products will sell on an ongoing basis. Of course, the other part of the puzzle is to make it fast and simple for your customers to buy from you.

Easytools will be a great starting point once you’ve created your downloadables, giving you the tools you need to quickly process payments, automatically deliver your products, launch promotions, and more. Try it out and start selling digital downloads.