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

The post How To Sell Digital Products On Your Website appeared first on Most Profitable Digital Products.

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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