Wondering how to sell digital products on your website? While many platforms claim to give you the ability to sell a digital product, mostly they are just software packages where you pay a (monthly) price to “showcase” your product. Getting people to see it is an entirely different matter altogether.
While the look of your website and of course your product is important, it’s not as important as traffic. Without traffic to your website you will never sell your product, no matter how good it looks! Not all traffic is equal either, so you need to learn how to attract the right kind of visitor to your website if you’re going to make a sale. So before you spend any time “tweeking” your website to look beautiful, it’s well worth learning the strategies which will actually make you sales first: traffic generation.
There’s two main types of traffic generation you can use to sell digital products on a website:
- Paid traffic (PPC – pay per click)
- Free/organic traffic – through content creation
Paid traffic is almost instant. You can set up an advertising campaign with a platform such as Google Adwords, and in less than an hour your campaign will be running, bringing targeted web traffic to your website.
Alternatively, (or additionally), you can create written (and/or video) content for your website in a bid to rank your content naturally (organically) on the search engines. This is a much slower process but with a lot of content you can ultimately bring in free traffic and make sales without paying for advertising.
How To Sell Digital Products On Your Website: Targeting
There’s different types of traffic too, and you don’t want to spend time and/or money attracting the wrong visitor to your site. If your digital product is a Yoga course, for example, you only want to attract visitors who have such an interest, since most people aren’t interested in Yoga.
Trying to sell to everyone means you’ll waste a lot of time, since only a small percentage of people want your offering. You could even target people who are specifically looking for an online Yoga course. That way, your marketing dollars will go further, and your content will be aimed specifically at that particular type of person.
How do you refine your targeting to sell more digital products with less work? Simple; get to know your target audience. Your target audience is the small sub-section of the online marketplace who is looking specifically for the product you are selling. Your “customer avatar” is your perfect customer; the kind of person who will buy from you and become a life long fan!
How To Sell Digital Products On Your Website: Keyword Research
One strategy you can use when running paid search advertising or content creation is keyword research. With keyword research, you can find the types of Google searches which are already being done online in your particular topic area. So taking the example from above of an online Yoga course, you could have a look for these kinds of keywords using Google’s keyword research tool. Here’s a few of the top searches for the topic of online Yoga course:
Using the two top search results from above, which one do you think would result in more sales, if you targeted those keywords in your advertising? The two top keywords from this search are “online Yoga classes” and “free Yoga classes online”. But if you paid to show your advert for “free Yoga classes online” you’d be wasting a lot of cash, because these people aren’t looking to pay for a course! In fact they are specifically looking for a freebie!
How To Sell Digital Products On Your Website: Organic Traffic
With this same keyword “online Yoga classes”, you could create some content on your website to attract visitors organically. However, looking at the search results pages on Google, you can see that there’s a huge amount of competing websites for this term. Plus there’s also a lot of sponsored posts for the keyword too:
You’re very unlikely therefore to be able to rank your content for this keyword on the first page of Google, given the huge competition. To get free organic traffic, you’ll need to find longer tail keywords which offer low SEO competition to do so. To do this, look through the keyword planner for keywords with 4 or more words. These longer tail keywords offer lower competition and are therefore easier to rank for with organic content. Here’s a few other keywords from the same search further down the list:
Touch Points
How many touch points before a sale? A “touch point” is a marketing term where a potential customer has interacted with your business in some way. It could be a phone call, an email follow up or a person interacting with your website. In terms of selling digital products from a website, it refers to a visitor landing on your site.
According to research it can take from 6-8 touch points before a visitor will buy from you, but this of course will vary from person to person, and industry to industry. But what this shows is that a visitor seldom buys from a website on their first encounter with it.
Most website visitors will leave without having bought anything, never to return. This can be particularly disappointing, especially if you’ve spent a lot of time or money getting them there in the first place! What can we do about this as marketers? Well a few things. Firstly, we want to engage with them on our website as much as possible and showcase our value to them. Many website owners use pop ups to do this and although these can be annoying, they work. A pop up gives the option for a website visitor to become an email subscriber by offering some free giveaway.
Website owners can also use other tactics to re-engage with visitors who have left their website through re-targeting them in another advertising campaign.
Why Collect Email Subscribers From A Website?
To enable a greater number of “touch points” with their visitors, website owners encourage them to opt in to their email list. On a website, most visitors are gone within a few minutes. However, once you have got their email details, you can follow up with them through email marketing.
Messages can be automatically sent out to your subscribers over a much long period of time than is possible on a website. Once on your email list, you can re-engage with subscribers regularly for weeks, months and even years and decades.
This gives you the opportunity to create many more touch points with them, and deliver value driven messages which build trust over time. Once your subscribers get to know, like and trust you, they are much more likely to buy from you. Since digital products are also less tangible than most physical products, email marketing allows you to explain the value in your digital product offering through your emails.
Re-Targeting
Re-targeting is a strategy to re-engage your website visitors with another advertisement after they have left your website. By placing a piece of code on your website, you can “follow” them and place adverts which speak to them directly, (knowing their interest in your topic)!
This is an incredibly powerful form of advertising and it can be fairly cheap too. You can specifically target only those people who have already interacted with your website. Re-targeting can also be used to target people who may have abandoned a checkout cart, or looked at a product but not bought it yet!
With email marketing too, you can “segment” your emails to deliver more appropriate and targeted messages according to the pervious actions taken (or not taken) by your subscribers.
Sales Pages
Of course you have also the sales page to consider when selling a digital product from your website. If you’re an affiliate, sales pages will often have been already tested by the product owner, So you simply send visitors through your affiliate link to the pre-made landing pages. But if you’re selling your own product, you will want to test and measure a number of different sales pages to understand which one performs the best. You can do this using split testing software, such as convertri.com
Offer A Guarantee
If you’re selling digital products, how can you encourage someone who is unsure whether your product is right for them? With a physical product, you pretty much know what you’re getting. But with digital products it can be more difficult to determine a product’s usefulness.
To help overcome this issue it’s definitely worth offering a guarantee. Guarantees have been proven to increase sales, especially online. See also the most profitable digital products.
Summary
Hopefully now you know better how to sell digital products on your website. Did I leave anything out? Probably! Please leave a message if you can add anything further to make this article more helpful to my visitors! Here’s the main points I’ve covered in this article:
- There’s two main ways to advertise a website; paid and organic
- Get to know your target market – your “customer avatar” (keyword research can help)
- Research content before creating and choose your keywords carefully if running paid ads
- You may need multiple touch points before you get the sale
- Get more touch points through using email marketing (collect visitors emails) and re-targeting
- Cross test sales pages to see which converts the best
- Offer a money back guarantee to give your customers more peace of mind
