Selling digital products online can be done in a number of different ways. From blogging to email marketing, paid advertising to YouTube and social media marketing. There’s a huge opportunity to sell other people’s products online for a cut of the profit. Anyone can learn the skills required to do it too, providing they are committed and stay the course. Many people start and drop out of course and there’s something like a 95% drop out rate among affiliate marketers.
That’s pretty huge! It means most won’t make it. But for the few that do, there’s a huge opportunity. Particularly if they get some momentum and are able to break through the difficult beginning stage of struggle and “failure”. If you look at those “failures” as stepping stones, you’ll have some idea of the affiliate mindset it takes to create success online through selling a product.
Once you make your first online sale, you have the tools to make many more, and when you’re selling other people’s products, you don’t have to fulfil product delivery or customer queries. This means a single sale is ultimately the key to a life of financial freedom – working from anywhere and being the “middleman” between the customer and the product – affiliate marketing.
Selling Digital Products Online
Yes many affiliates are able to make millions in sales revenue. And all without dealing with a customer or handling a product! But many more don’t make it and instead struggle and quit! So what’s the difference between those who make affiliate marketing work for them and those who don’t.
Well perseverance and tenacity are are two common attributes of successful affiliates. Affiliate marketing isn’t easy, at least at first. But once the wheels get spinning with affiliate marketing, you can make sales in your sleep because of the work you’ve already done! This is one of the reasons so many affiliates quit – they just don’t see the bigger picture.
Imagine making sales every single day, without lifting a finger! This is a reality for many affiliate marketers who are selling digital products online. But to get there, they overcame a lot of adversity. An analogy I like to use is the one of the Chinese Bamboo tree. Apparently the tree has a four to five year gestation period under the soil before anything sprouts above the surface. After this time, once the sprouts start appearing, the tree can grow 90 feet in only five weeks.
Selling digital products online can be a little bit like this and depending on your marketing strategy, it can take more or less time before that growth is apparent. The marketing strategy you choose will likely depend on a number of things such as your budget, available time and natural preferences and personality. If you’re more outgoing, video might be more to your liking. Whereas if you’re more introverted, blogging or email marketing might be more to your liking.
Selling Digital Products Online: Marketing Strategy
Your marketing strategy will be a large factor in how fast your business can take off. With slow methods such as organic marketing (blogging or video blogging), it can take much longer. But with paid marketing you can see results much more quickly, with a large enough marketing budget.
I must say I struggled with paid marketing because I didn’t have much of a marketing budget. So I ran advertising sporadically at first, cutting them off when I ran out of budget. This can be very frustrating because you are essentially cutting off the supply of customers while trying to build a business!
As well as running paid advertising, I also worked at blogging and some video marketing – although, I was much more comfortable blogging. But like anything, the more you do of something the better (and more comfortable) you get at it.
After a while of blogging, I would get some (sporadic) sales coming through from my email list. (definitely build an email list). Over time, sales came in more and more regularly. But had I not continued blogging through the quiet patches, when nothing was happening, this would never have happened! Faith and confidence in your path is therefore a major pre-requisite to success when selling affiliate products online. I definitely lacked belief in the early days of blogging, and my activity is testimony to it. But as sales popped in, I became more and more confident that blogging would wrok for me.
Why Use Email Marketing?
Email marketing should be used whatever other means of marketing you choose. That’s because an email list puts your marketing strategy on steroids! With a paid advertising campaign, you’ll be sending traffic to your offer or to a landing page.
Why use landing pages? Landing pages are far better because you can collect the details of your visitor and build a much longer term relationship with them through email marketing. Sending paid traffic directly to an offer is a mistake because you only get one chance of making the sale (per visitor). Send them to your email list instead, and you can send them messages for months, and even years!
Building an email list of subscribers is the best thing I learned how to do as an affiliate. Before that I was struggling trying to make sales for free from a single website.
Best Digital Products To Sell
What are the best digital products to sell? You might think it’s the ones which make you the most money of course? While this is true, it’s also the ones which give the most value. Valuable products are useful and therefore people will pay larger amounts for them. Products which help people with problems are the ones which people will pay most for.
In the dating niche, you might sell a digital product which helps you create the best dating profile, for example. Or to make the best impression on a first date! In the business niche, business tools are good because they are needed by business owners to run their operations. But the products people will pay the most for are those which help them solve the biggest problem of all: health, money and lifestyle.
A good product choice will depend on your own preferences and how you intend to sell the product. If you’re going to create a lot of content about a product, you’ll want to be well aligned to the topic. Otherwise it’s much more difficult creating content on your subject.
Ideally choose a product which has a high ticket opportunity and the potential to sell subscription digital products too. Using a product range means you can benefit from multiple sales to the same customer. This gives you more potential to earn from each person you refer a product to.
