How to Sell Digital Products on your Blog
In the age of algorithm changes and Google core updates, it is more important than ever to diversify your income streams in your online business, especially if you are a blogger who relies on traffic for ad revenue. A great way to do this is by selling digital products, because they have very little overhead cost and you can easily create them yourself and package them to sell right on your blog. If you are looking to create and sell digital products with your blog, this is our guide on how to get started, and some great resources to get you there.
This post contains affiliate links, I earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you) if you sign up for services or purchase through my links.
What Digital Products to Sell
When deciding the best digital product for you to sell, you need to first consider your audience. If you already have an audience grown from your blog, this should be easy. What problems do the people in your audience have that you can solve through a digital product? What helpful resource could you provide to them that would make their life easier?
If you don’t have an audience yet, consider the content you are creating. Your digital products will need to be something that your content will lead your future audience to your products. It needs to make sense, and be a nice flow for your digital product funnel. For example, if you have a food blog, you don’t want to try and sell coloring pages, because that would not make sense for anyone landing on your website.
The scope of different digital products you can sell is broad- everything from printables to digital resources, informational products or courses that teach something, spreadsheets, and more.
If you have an established blog, consider what you have created already for your blog that could be repackaged for sale- I.E… a group of recipes, printables, etc…
Leave your blogging niche in the comments, and I’ll come up with some ideas you can create.
How to Create Digital Products for your Blog
There are many, many ways you can create your digital products. From Canva to Photoshop, Illustrator, and more… The best program to create your digital products on is the one that you know how to use. If you want to create spreadsheets, but love using Google sheets over excel, use Google Sheets to create your products.
If you aren’t sure where to begin, I highly recommend Canva. I feel like Canva is such a valuable tool, with a very user friendly interface to get you started. You can use Canva to create printables, ebooks, informational products, and more.
If you are ready to dive in DEEP to the technical side of creating printables and similar digital products, our friends over at Gold City Ventures have a wonderful, budget friendly online course to teach you just that. Check out their free workshop to see if their program is right for you.
Leave me your creation questions below so I can do my next posts on those topics for you! I’m also interested in creating some tutorial videos, so let me know what you want to see created.
How to use PLR to Quickly Create Digital Products
One great way to fast track your digital product creation is to use templates (hello, Canva!) or pre-made PLR products that you can edit to suit your business or brand, and quickly list for sale.
What is PLR? PLR stands for Private Label Rights content that you can purchase and sell, sometimes as-is, or sometimes with some edits to customize it to suit your audience. These make digital product creation faster than ever. Our favorite PLR can be found from Mallaury at Premium PLR for Bloggers. I use her PLR all the time for my Making Mom Magic website.
Also look for Canva templates that are made for commercial use to purchase and use to quickly create the products you need for your website. I have purchased lots of these on Etsy- simply search “Canva templates” and check the description/shop policies to see if they’re acceptable for commercial use.
How to Deliver your Digital Downloads
There are lots of different ways to deliver your digital downloads that you sell on your blog. I have two that I highly recommend.
For a super simple and easy to use tool that allows you to embed products right into your blog posts, I really love Gumroad. It is so easy to use, and a great way to sell one off products or subscriptions. They handle the delivery and payments for you, too. Plus, they make it super easy to create affiliates for your products, and they handle all of the back end of that, too!
For a shop style platform to create for your blog, I recommend Shopify. It has a fee to use, and there are some free alternatives, like Woocommerce, but Woo is hosted on your wordpress site, and I don’t know about you, but my site is already housing a lot between posts, media, etc.. I tried using Woocommerce on my site before and had lots of issues. I prefer Shopify, because they host everything, and they have a platform that is so user friendly for setting up your shop and creating a beautiful store front.
If you are wanting someone to walk you through the process of creating your shop, and beyond, I highly recommend Monica Frose.
How to Market your Digital Products
When selling digital products as a blogger, you market your digital products just the same way you do your blog. You can promote them via Pinterest, Facebook, and more. You can share them with your email list, and even create a funnel with your website and email list that sells your digital products for you. Monica Frose is a great resource for this, as well. She has the best products and tutorials to teach you how to sell your products through funnels and your email list.
I will have more posts soon on marketing digital products, so leave me your questions in the comments below.
Selling your Digital Products on Etsy or Other Platforms
I have been selling on Etsy for 11 years. I wish I could tell you that it’s as simple as it was back in 2013 when you could post your digital products on there and sell, sell, sell, however it is a little more complicated. I don’t recommend only posting your digital products to Etsy and waiting for them to send you customers. However, I do recommend utilizing other platforms like Etsy, Teachers Pay Teachers, etc.. to boost your digital product sales. I recommend setting up your own storefront or system like Gumroad to sell directly through your blog or email list, and using Etsy and other platforms as a way to sell more on the side, and get those customers over to your website. I look forward to teaching more about that soon.
This is all not to say don’t sell your digital products on Etsy.. it is a great platform, and a great way to get some sales going, but there’s a learning curve, and the competition over there is steep, with many sellers selling their digital products for low, low prices that are not conducive to making good money with your digital products, like you can when you sell to your existing audience.
While this is a somewhat brief overview of how to start selling digital products, I am looking to create content on this topic, so please leave me any questions, or suggestions on what you’d like me to cover next, in the comments section below. Also, be sure to sign up for my email newsletter, so you know when new posts go live.