One of the advantages of selling digital products is that they pay much more than physical products do. A physical affiliate product will typically pay between 1% and 10% whereas a digital product typically pays from 30-40% commission.

That’s quite a big leap and if you’re an affiliate it’s worth noting that digital products pay so much more. But you still need to sell them in order to make anything and digital products are different to physical ones! With a physical product, it’s usually quite obvious what it is, what it does and why you want to buy it. But with digital products, the value can be more obscure. How useful is a digital course, for example? You probably won’t know how much use it is unless you purchase it.

Because of this “obscure” factor of many digital products you may need to connect to a potential customer many more times to make the sale. From a website, it takes several touch points before someone makes a buying decision. With digital products it can take more than with physical products. That’s why it’s a good idea to build an email list, particularly if you’re selling digital products.

How To Sell Digital Products Online: The Value Of An Email List

An email list lets you collect your website visitors email details and follow up with them via an email marketing campaign. This is done through using an autoresponder. See also free autoresponder for affiliate marketing if you don’t have one already. On a website, a visitor will only hang around for a few minutes, if you’re lucky. Many will bounce in seconds if they don’t immediately find what they’re looking for. Most will never return. This means if you’re attempting to sell a digital product from a website directly, you’ve only got a small window to get your visitor to click on your banner, or your affiliate link. Even the small percentage who click it, won’t buy.

But once you get your visitors to sign up on your website, and join your email list, you have the chance to follow up with email messages over a much longer period of time. By providing value driven emails, subscribers are much more likely to open your messages and keep opening them. This means you can give them more information on your products and help them with their problem. By building trust through delivering value, they are much more likely to make a buying decision with you.

The Law Of Reciprocity

The law of reciprocity states that if someone does something for you, you are likely to return the favour somehow because you somehow feel indebted to them. If you provide genuine value and deliver email marketing messages which are genuinely designed to help and support your subscribers, they are much more likely to see you as a person of value. If the product is right for them, they are also much more likely to buy from you – since you will have given them days, weeks or even months or years worth of value before they make that decision.

The “know, like and trust” factor is an important factor in marketing. People looking to buy something will now sign up to many email lists and look at many websites. It’s a buyers market when shopping online. To shine out you need to offer more value than the others who are only trying to sell.

If I join an email list where the owner is only trying to sell to me (through their affiliate link) it becomes quite obvious straight away. I quickly unsubscribe! If each email is only an affiliate link, and a single line of text, that screams of someone NOT providing any value in their emails.

Build confidence by delivering value in your email marketing messages. When people on your email list get to know, like and trust you, they will buy from you.

Guarantees

Offer guarantees with your products. Of course as an affiliate you don’t always get this option. But you do get to choose your product/s. So make sure you choose a product which gives customers a money back guarantee if they don’t like it when they get it.

Guarantees are proven to increase purchases and are especially important for digital products because again, you don’t really know what you’re getting with a digital product – until you buy it. If there’s a guarantee with it, you’re much more likely to make that decision as a consumer.

All the products I promote have a money back guarantee which means if someone doesn’t like it they can claim their money back – no questions asked. This is pretty important when you’re selling anything online but particularly so with digital products.

A Marketing “Engine” – How To Sell Digital Products Online

To get people to join your email list, you need to attract them somehow to a website or landing page which you own. If you’re paying for advertising, you’re much better off using a landing page over a website. A landing page is a specific page built deliberately with one purpose: to get subscribers to join your email list. A website has many pages and a visitor can browse around to their heart’s content. But on a landing page they only have two options: sign up or leave.

Given these two options, it’s much easier to build an email list using a landing page. You can cross test multiple landing pages and adverts to get your opt in rate up. Some landing pages will convert as much as 50% or even 60% of their visitors into subscribers. When your opt in rate is above 40% you’ll waste less money sending traffic.

If you send paid marketing to a generic website, much of your marketing budget is lost. People can click on your pages, look around, click on your banners and so on. A landing page is much more directed and it will definitely help you sell your digital products for less. You can get a landing page software here which will help you lower your costs by increasing your sign up rate.

Paid Marketing Or Organic Traffic?

Before you can consider your landing page, you need to learn about getting traffic. There’s more than one kind of traffic too. You’ll need targeted traffic – that is, people/visitors who are specifically interested in your product or service, or who are likely to be. To understand who you are marketing to is an important “cornerstone” in your marketing efforts. Your customer “avatar” is the type of person who is most likely to be interested in your digital product/service.

Once you understand who that is, you can target them with your content, email messages and advertising. All points of your marketing efforts can be designed to speak to their needs and pains. It will make you a more effective communicator if you know your customer avatar better than they know themselves!

Paid marketing or organic marketing? While organic marketing is free, it takes a lot more effort than running advertising. A paid advert is something you can run almost immediately. You can see within a short time whether it’s effective. If so, you can easily scale up to a larger audience. Organic marketing on the other hand is slow. You need to create a lot of content to generate a similar amount of traffic as a low budget advert. However, content can continue working for you “hands free” long after you have created it, making sales for you on complete autopilot and passively.

A Good Product Sells Itself

Your product choice is pretty important too and a good product sells itself! A good product will also come with a bunch of marketing materials for you to use. Webinars, emails, banners and other marketing materials is a sign that a product owner has made your job easier. If you can use existing marketing materials it means you don’t need to create you own. You can then focus on marketing, rather than creating marketing materials.

Make sure your product is a good one. To do this on Clickbank you can check the gravity of a product. A high gravity denotes that your product is selling well already, whereas a low gravity score may mean the product is yet to prove itself. More on gravity score here.

Learn more about the best digital products you can sell online in this video series.

Also checkout my article on the most profitable digital products you can sell online.

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