If you’ve considered supplementing your income by creating an eCommerce website, you may have become overwhelmed with the thought of stocking products, selling and shipping them. It can be quite an investment. Instead, you might consider setting up a website that sells digital downloads. Many customers are moving towards accepting the concept of buying digital goods online, and there’s no inventory or initial investment to worry about on your end.
Digital downloads work great for everything from e-books, PDFs, webinars, tutorials, templates, photographs and any other type of downloadable file. Selling digital downloads can broaden your product range, aid your sales of your existing products and open you up to new customers. Customers would rather pay for digital products and immediately download them rather then wait for a shipment. This provides instant gratification for your customers and eliminates some of the headaches involved in shipping orders for you.
Setting Up Your Website to Sell Digital Downloads
The biggest stumbling block for most people who want to start selling digital files is the setting up of a site that makes that possible. Fortunately there are web hosts who specialize in such sites, so the HTML and coding has already been done for you. You’ll just do a one-time upload of the file or files to sell. Then those files will be on the host’s server, ready to go to visitors who purchase them.
MadBeeTech Web Hosting is one such host that specializes in websites that sell digital downloads. MadBeeTech has gone the route of offering a full-service, turn-key system that removes the set up burden from the website owner.
When you host with MadBeeTech you’ll have your own domain, and a point-and-click website builder that makes it easy to define the look and content of the pages that will make up your site. That’s pretty standard fare nowadays for a hosting business. What’s different here is that there’s a built-in system that automates the selling and delivery of digital content.
When a visitor at your site is interested in a file you sell, the visitor adds it to your site’s shopping cart and checks out. Checking out puts the visitor at your PayPal page. After paying, the funds go directly into your PayPal account, and the visitor (now a buyer) immediately gets auto-emailed a link to download the purchased file or files. You don’t participate in the process — the system does all the work. Funds immediately in your PayPal account. Check. Buyer gets immediate access to purchased files. Check.
What Digital Products to Sell Online
If you can turn something into a file, you can sell it online. With that said, here are a few practical ideas for digital downloads to sell from your website. Distributing information via digital downloads is becoming ubiquitous. From universities to libraries, it seems everyone is offering downloads from their websites.
Tech Training Tutorials
If you’ve got the tech skills to create a technical “over the shoulder” training video, this is an awesome digital product idea for you! There is a huge demand for easy to follow, step-by-step technical trainings for how to use software.
Even though many software companies have their own “knowledge base” of tutorials, many times they are not detailed enough or users have a hard time learning from those. Creating a screenshare video tutorial that helps your customers set up and get started with a software or tech platform quickly will save them tons of time and frustration!
If you’re techy or love systems and new software, this is a great idea for you. Tons of people need lots of hand-holding to get the most out of their tech platforms. You could consider these “tech courses” but I think of them more as a series of video tutorials. It’s like a library of technical videos that people can reference.
Depending on how many videos you want to create and how comprehensive your product, it can take anywhere from an hour to a couple of weeks. Creating a 30-minute quick start training might take you all of 2 hours to prep, plan, record, edit and produce. Whereas if we use the example of the comprehensive training library teaching how to use a very advanced program, that might take weeks to create. There’s no one size fits all answer, but pick a scope that feels manageable to you. Start small with something you can create in a day or two, and charge a fair price for.
Spreadsheets and Trackers
This type of digital product is something you may not have thought of before, which is exactly why it’s such a great idea and a huge opportunity right now. For all the eBooks, courses, and other downloadable digital products out there — you may not have seen too many of these.
We’re talking about spreadsheets, trackers, and calculators. One thing I like about this unique digital product idea is that it can work in tons of different industries. There are so many ways you can use this idea of selling a spreadsheet, tracker or calculator in any niche!
Design and Graphic Templates
Design templates are the perfect digital product for anyone who is creative, visual and maybe even already freelancing as a designer. If you’ve created templates for yourself to use, why not package those up and sell them to others who don’t have the skills or time to create their own?
A design template can be as simple as a collection of Photoshop files, images that can be customized to be used on a website, or even pre-designed Instagram or Pinterest graphics. You can even create and sell your own stock photos that people can use on their websites or on social media. People who aren’t very design-savvy are looking for unique, stylish design templates for just about everything.
