How to Create & Sell Digital Products
Well hello there pretty face, how you doin' today?
Me? I'm good, just here teaching you
how to create and sell digital products
because that's ALL the rage these days.
Alright, let's get started because this a loaded lesson!
First, let's just get one thing straight – what IS a digital product?
A product which can delivered digitally or virtually to the purchaser.
The following products can be considered digital products:
- eCourses
- Printables
- PDF workbooks
- Templates for digital systems
- eBooks
Now, how do you create and sell those?
Ecourses.
There are few ways here to actually do this. If you're creating a “mini course” it can include only text notes or even only videos but for a full-blown, over $40 course, you're going to want to include both videos (either you speaking or screencasts), text notes and even workbooks or homework.
For video content: Produce and edit a video and publish to YouTube (make sure it's “unpublished” so that you can embed it but nobody else can find it by searching YouTube) or Vimeo.
For Text notes: Use a program like InDesign, Photoshop, Canva or even Word or Google Docs to write out your notes and put them in a pretty PDF form (PDFs are much more professional than a standard document). Then you can use a trick like this to have it be downloadable in the lesson.
Platforms: If you're wanting something super simple with drag-and-drop options that's not hosted on your own site (this has both pros and cons), you can use Thinkific or Teachable. I personally love WPCourseWare to host my courses on my own WordPress site.
Having budget issues? You can create password protected pages on your website and embed videos and text note downloads in those pages then give the password to anyone who purchases. It's not flawless as customers could give passwords to non-customers BUT it's an option.
Printables & PDF Workbooks & eBooks
Creation: Use a service like Adobe InDesign, Photoshop or Canva to create them (or hire a designer).
Selling: If you're using WordPress, you can easily use plugins like Easy Digital Downloads or WooCommerce (if you need help setting up WooCommerce, check this out) to streamline the process of selling these easy downloads.
Simple solution on other website platforms (not WordPress): You can set-up a PayPal button for the cost of the product you're selling and then tell PayPal to send the buyer to a custom thank you page which includes the link to your download. Easy peasy.
Templates
These are going to be very similar in Creation and Delivery to the products above – you will need to create the template in whatever system you are creating it for (Photoshop for Photoshop templates, Google Spreadsheets for Spreadsheet templates, etc), then sell it in the ways I mentioned above.
Alright, that's it —> super easy but I understand it can be completely overwhelming.
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