Why sell digital products? If you’re thinking of selling anything online it’s because there’s money in it! Affiliate marketers sell other people’s products and services for a cut of the profit. So if you’re going to do this, why not sell the most profitable items? You can sell physical products if you want, but physical products typically pay affiliates between 1% and 10% commission. Compare this to digital products which typically pay between 30% and 40% commission and you can see the attraction to digital.
Digital products can be downloaded from anywhere globally with no cost for postage, packaging or handling. This makes them one of the most versatile products you can sell online. With physical products there’s a boundary to countries which incur greater costs, such as import taxes. Manufacturing, handing and delivery of physical products carries more costs. Hence why affiliate receive less commission with physical products. The product owners simply can’t afford to pay more.
But this isn’t the case with digital products. With digital products, advertising is the greatest cost, (once the product is created) so third party advertisers (affiliates) receive larger commissions. See also most profitable digital products.
Why Sell Digital Products – Subscriptions & Memberships
Digital product have another advantage over physical products, too. Many of them carry subscription and membership fees. A training course, for example, might carry a monthly fee for access. As a product promoter, you can benefit from recurring income by referring customers to these kinds of products. Software products too offer ongoing benefit and carry subscription charges. This kind of product might be software which is needed for online businesses. With such a product, the customer is likely to maintain their membership for life, if it’s needed for their business.
A good example of this kind of product is an email autoresponder. Autoresponders are used by affiliates to build email lists to sell their products. Certain autoresponders will pay affiliates a recurring commission on sales they generate. Another example is an online business course which offers help and support in building an online business. With such a service, a subscriber is likely to maintain their subscription for a long time, especially if their business takes off.
Why Sell Digital Products: A Product Range
With a physical product you only make the sale once! Typically, there aren’t many physical products you can sell which offer to pay you ongoing commissions for any later purchases made by your referral. Imagine if Apple, for example, had an affiliate program which rewarded you for the initial referral and for all the subsequent purchases they made from Apple: TV’s, I-phones, Laptops, I-pads and so on. You could make a tidy sum over the course of that customer’s lifetime if you were paid for referring that customer.
Sadly Apple doesn’t have such a program, but with digital online training courses you can benefit from the lifetime of a customer in this manner if you choose to promote a product range. A product range gives you multiple products to offer to existing customers. So after selling the “entry” level product to a customer, you can benefit from their later purchases from that range.
You can access such a product range through this starter account.
A product range gives you multiple ways to earn through selling a single “entry level” product within a larger sales funnel.
Sell Internationally Without Touching A Product
With digital products there’s no borders or controls. As long as someone has a laptop and internet connection (and a means to pay), they can purchase a digital product from anywhere! If you have something physical to sell, it’s much more difficult. To sell internationally you need to understand international tax regulations and delivery costs to different countries, (with a physical product). With a digital product there’s no need.
The Affiliate Marketing Model
Using the affiliate marketing business model, you don’t need to personally have created (or own) the product yourself. This means you can simply promote existing products which offer huge value. To create digital products of your own is time consuming and difficult. You don’t need to either because there’s thousands of digital products available online to promote.
Plus, by finding the most valuable types of digital products, you can save yourself a huge amount of effort. Selling high ticket digital products can be much more lucrative than selling low value physical ones. You would need to sell thousands of low valued physical products to make the same as you could with only a handful of digital products which offer high ticket commissions, recurring (subscription) commissions and a product range, for example. (See also recurring income affiliate programs).
Access a digital product range and learn about how to sell. Create a starter account here.
