In recent times, the e-commerce industry has experienced huge success in the selling of digital products such as ebooks, videos, courses, and software. These products can’t be held, tasted, or touched, but almost everyone consumes them.
One advantage of this kind of e-commerce business is the fact that they are popular and easy to distribute. As a content creator, you can sell digital products and make a substantial income from them. However, with so many options for digital products, you might be wondering which ones are the best to invest your time and money in.
That's why this guide will walk you through some of the most popular digital products in 2022. The article will also cover how you can create some of these digital products and marketing tips to sell them successfully.
What Are Digital Products?
Digital products are those products that can be delivered and bought digitally. They are digital assets that are stored digitally and shared online. Ebooks, online courses, web templates and other forms of digital content are regarded as digital products. They are content that can be downloaded, played, or streamed through the use of electronic devices like Personal Computers, mobile telephones, and so on.
Many online marketers or e-commerce businesses, sell these intangible products along with the products and services they offer due to the popularity and ease of distribution. One advantage these products has over other online product is the fact that they can be created once and sold repeatedly to different customers without having to replenish inventory. Making them a good business for content creators, bloggers, digital marketers, and freelancers who want to make a few bucks online without little or no stress to invest.
Benefits of selling digital products
There are many benefits of selling digital products. It is good to invest your resources in creating and selling digital products because of the following;
1. Low cost of Production
Unlike physical products like phones, machinery, and computers, digital products cost little or nothing to produce. The most expense you have to bear is the software or equipment used to produce them. For example, if you want to produce a video course or ebook, there are different free software like Inshot, Adobe slides, and Microsoft word that can be used to create them.
2. No need to store or manage inventory
Digital products exist online, they can be accessed, bought, and downloaded online. Its online availability has eliminated the need for storage or inventory space. Instead of making use of physical storage which might be limited and expensive, you store your files in cloud storage like Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive. You can also use external storage devices as a secondary storage option. This way, products are safe and secured.
3. Highly profitable
Digital products are highly profitable because you only create them once and you can sell them to millions of people worldwide. Furthermore, there is no recurring cost of goods, so you retain the majority of your sales in profits. For example, if your ebook cost $100 and you were able to sell it to 2 million people. That's $200 million. That's a lot of money.
4. Flexible products.
Digital products are flexible which means you can convert a single digital product into different kinds of digital services. For example, you can offer free products like ebooks and documents to build your email list, offer monthly paid subscriptions for access to exclusive digital content like newsletters, or licenses to use your digital products like graphics design templates. You have a lot of options as to how you incorporate digital products into your business.
5 Orders are delivered instantly
One of the main advantages of digital products over physical products is the fact that customers can have access to them instantly. This saves you thousands of dollars on shipping and packaging costs. This feature allows you to earn more profit since you don't need to ship and package products as well as monitor orders.
How to sell digital products
Before starting any business, there are some things you need to consider before launching the business. The same process goes for anyone who wants to start selling digital products. If you don't strategize, you might not get the desired result. Here are a few tips you need to consider before you start selling digital products.
1. Build an e-commerce website
Before you start the business of selling your digital products, you must first build an online store or website. Setting up a website nowadays is relatively easy and cheap. All you need is to purchase a domain name and web hosting on platforms like WordPress. Then you can start designing your website through a click and drag pattern. There are other platforms that are ready-made like Shopify and Bigcommerce which allow you to market your digital products at an affordable fee. You can also make use of e-commerce marketplaces like Amazon and Facebook.
Having a website makes your business looks more professional. Furthermore, customers will be able to order and pay for their products on your website.
2. Find or create a digital product
After you have set up your online store or looked for an e-commerce marketplace to sell your products. You need to look for a product to sell. These products can be based on your industry or any other top trending industry. You can research the best-selling digital products in 2022 and decide whether to resell existing products or create your own. The more you research, the better you will get an understanding of these products. Look for relatable blogs, product reviews, and other forums. Research how your competitors are doing things and see what you can offer differently. Make use of keyword research, feedback, and Google trends to search for high-selling digital products. Try to resell or create your product making sure it is unique and offers value to your target audience. Digital products include music, ebooks, online courses, or online services.
3. Create offer and giveaway
One thing you can do to help boost your digital product is to offer discounts or giveaways. A lot of people are always drawn to offers and giveaways. What most companies like Hubspot do is offer a free basic plan, then have other professional plans that are priced according to some features. Some also offer free trials either for 14 or 30 days. This way people can test their product and if they are satisfied with it, they can subscribe to their premium plan.
4. Leverage on ads
One way to sell your digital products is by running targeted ads to your target audience. You can make use of PPC ads like Google or social media ads like Facebook and Instagram. Facebook has an advanced ads technology that can help you serve ads based on people's interests, location, age, occupation, and other important demographics. It also comes with advanced retargeting technology making it a must-use if you want your products to reach the right people and generate the desired result. Many e-commerce platforms like Amazon also have their own ads platform that users can leverage. You can also optimize your products by giving them a title, meta description, and alt text if need be. This will make your product more visible anytime a visitor type certain keywords that relate to your products on the e-commerce platform.
How To Create Your Digital Product?
Once you know the industry and product you want to sell, you need to know the step to creating one
1. Brainstorm and on ideas
Before you start making your digital product, you need to brainstorm ideas by writing them down. Take a look at your industry. Ask yourself the following questions;
- Can you teach customers how to use your service or products? For example, if you are a digital marketer, you could create online classes and teach people how to market on Facebook or how to use Google and Facebook ads.
- Are there problems you can solve that are related to your industry? As digital marketers, most marketers face problems every day involving how to sell their products. You could create a video or downloadable blog post that solves some of their problems.
- What value does your business offer and what topics are related to them? As a digital marketer, you help businesses market their products using various digital strategies like ads, automation, and artificial intelligence to make sure they get the best result. You can create some software or tools that can help businesses market their products efficiently.
- What are you good at? If you’re great at digital marketing or web development, you could teach other people how to get better digital marketing and web development too by creating online courses.
Remember that you don’t need to come up with the best digital products. The best way to create a digital product is to leverage your industry or what you are good at and create a form of digital content out of it.
2. Research ideas
If you don't research well on what you want to sell, you will end up selling little or nothing. Note that the digital products you want to sell must appeal to customers' pain points and needs and must add value. If they don't do these things people might not buy.
Ask yourself the following question when researching the digital product you want to create;
- Who is your audience: You need to identify your audience. Those who will be interested in what you want to offer. This can be gotten from previous engagement from social media and website analytics.
- What are their pain points: pain points are problems or queries that are encountered by your audience and other people that may be interested in your industry. For example, a marketer who wants to set up a Facebook ad or a marketer who wants to add chatbots to his website.
- What kind of digital content do they consume: There are different types of formats of digital content. There are videos, ebooks, podcasts, music etc. Some people will prefer videos to ebooks, while some people might prefer podcasts to videos. You have to determine the one your audience will likely engage with.
Researching these questions will give you an insight into who your customers are, the kind of problems they are encountering, and the form of digital product you will have to create. Note that the form of the digital product depends on the problem your audience is facing.
You can start researching by
- Joining online forums like Facebook and WhatsApp groups dedicated to your industry. Furthermore, forums dedicated to hobbies and communities in your industry can help you learn more about what people want and need in your broader industry.
- You can also read products review on various competitors' websites, blogs, and other websites to get an idea of the best-selling digital products
- Search for blog content that your community or forum might be reading to get more ideas about what to sell. If you are a digital marketer, read blogs that are dedicated to digital marketing and other related industry.
- Engage with your customers: If you already have an online presence, you can gain insight by asking your customers for reviews and feedback. You can ask them what they think about your business and ways you can improve it. This can spark an idea about a digital product to create. Use your website or social media analytics to view content that had high engagement and try to build your digital product around it.
3. Validate your idea
Before you start selling your digital product, you might want to validate the idea and make sure it’s solid. Don't start a new business without knowing if it has a good chance to be successful. You can validate your idea by doing keyword research to know how many people are searching for your topic or product you are creating. Let's say you want to create CRM software to help improve customer relations. You have to know the volume of people searching for CRM software. Use Google trends to look for topics that are growing in interest. Make sure you have the audience for what you are preferring to sell. If your product doesn't vibe with your audience, then it won’t sell.
4. Build your website
Once you have validated your idea and you are certain it has a chance of being successful, you will need to create a website or a platform you can use to sell that product. Without this platform, you might not be able to sell to people. This is because your website makes your business looks professional. Additionally, the website or platform also takes care of things like inventory, shopping cart, payment gateway, and other important things that will make the e-commerce journey a successful one.
On the website, prospects can browse, add products to their shopping carts, pay for the products and download the products. Most people make use of marketplaces to market their products. You can make use of Amazon, Facebook marketplace, Shopify, etc. Additionally, you can build your website on platforms like WordPress and Magento. However, you will need a web designer to help you set it up.
5. Create your first product
Now that you have created your online store or website, you can now start creating your digital product. Remember it can be ebooks, podcasts, music, online courses, and food recipes.
Tools You can leverage for creating Digital Products
- Ebook
2. Online courses
- InShot
- Viva Video
- Microsoft word
- Google docs
- Powerpoint
- PiktoChart
Music
- Audio recorder
- iPhone
Document
- Adobe PDF
- WPS office
- Microsoft word
- Canva
Some Popular Digital Products In 2022
1. ebooks
eBooks are one of the most popular types of digital products in 2022. This is because they are easy to create and distribute with written text and few relevant images or infographics. In addition, they are easy to consume using various platforms like mobile phones, computers, and tablets.
Here are some ebooks format that can be sold online;
- How-to books
- Biographies
- Travel guides
- Start-up guides for business owners
- Manuals
- Songbooks
- Textbooks
- Essays
- Poetry
- Novels
- Stories
- Manuscripts
- Recipe books
2. Online courses
Online Courses are a series of videos or other content delivered to learners over the internet. The need for online courses has risen tremendously in the past few years, especially in response to the outbreak of COVID-19. Companies like Udacity, Coursera and Udemy are making giant strides in the online learning industry. Millions of people are taking online courses to learn practical skills that can help them improve their careers or start new businesses.
Here are some types of digital courses
- Introductory courses
- Advanced courses
- Master courses
- foundational courses
- Livestreams and webcasts
- Bootcamp
Some trending courses(source Udacity)
- Digital marketing
- Web development
- Data analysis
- Data science
- programming
3. Software
Creating or making software from scratch can be expensive and time-consuming making it a product worth investing in. In this technological world, most people want their job automated. Automation makes people's life easier and less time-consuming. A lot of people can multitask and get things done in no time with the aid of automation software. So if you have a background in coding, you can start something. You can create software that users can customize based on their specific needs. One advantage of this is that you only have to create it once and sell it to numerous people. You can also have the software in various stages and assign prices to each stage. For example, you can have a starter plan, an advanced plan, and a professional plan.
Here are some examples of software products
Some popular software products include:
- WordPress themes and plugins
- Canva templates
- Bootstrap templates
- email templates
- CMS themes and plugins
- Marketing themes
- design templates
- Video games
- Desktop software
- Digital course themes
- eCommerce themes
- Email and newsletter templates
- Forum themes
- HTML5 templates
- Landing page templates
- Marketing themes
- Mobile apps
4. Video
Video content remains the most popular form of content. Millions of people consume video content every day on youtube.
Here are some video ideas
- Educational videos
- Event coverage
- How-to videos
- Product explainer video
- Comedy skit
- Tutorials
- Animation
- Interviews
- Presentations
5. Audio files
You can make money online by selling audio files. You can create generic sound effects or music that can be added to video content. In addition, audiobooks and subscription-based podcasts and lectures. There are popular sounds you can focus on like the sound of a stream, the rain, a quiet background, etc. These sounds are used in various digital content like movies, music, videos, skit, and other forms of content.
Some examples of Audio content you can focus on include;
- Music effects
- background music
- Podcasts intros/bumpers or background music
- Recorded lectures
- Audiobooks
- Foreign language lessons
- Relaxing background noises
6. Photography
Images are very important when it comes to content creation and marketing. Research shows that a social media post with an image is very likely to reach more audiences than those that do not. Furthermore, content with images is more search engine friendly. Photographs can be sold through photo marketplaces and individual websites or created on-demand as a service. examples are Pixabay, Unsplash, etc
If you have a smartphone with a great camera or camera equipment and an eye for photography, you’re well on your way to getting into stock photography.
Ideas on what to focus on include;
- Backgrounds
- Digital prints
- Event photos
- Portraits
- Stock photos
- Animals
- cities
- flowers
- insects
- automobiles
- fashion
- food
- travel
- tech
- beaches
7. Documents
Documents are easy for content creators, educators, and writers to make money online. Most of these people write articles and blog posts. You can package your existing work and sell it in downloadable form. There are people out there looking for quality information and resources that can help them accomplish tasks.
Some commonly-sold types of documents include:
- EPUB documents(case studies and statistics)
- Live documents(google docs and sheets)
- Presentation( PowerPoint, google slide PowerPoint, Keynote Google )
- PDFs(Blueprints, How-to guides, Manuals, and Manuscripts)
- Printable documents(content calendar, planners, guides, checklist, etc)
- Resumes
- Journaling
- Professional templates
- Workbooks
- Whitepapers
- Report sheet
- Spreadsheets
8. Professional services
If you know how to provide a service like content writing, social media marketing, web design, and development, data analysis, or even virtual assistant skills, you can easily sell it through your site or sites like Upwork, Fiverr, and Freelancer.
Examples of skills include;
- Content writer
- Web developer
- Data analyst
- Social media markerter
- Digital marketer
- Web designer
- Graphics designer
- Email marketer
9. Graphics and digital art
Just like photos and images, graphics and digital art are popular digital products that have a wide variety of lucrative options for earning income. As a graphics designer, there are a lot of things you can create and sell.
Examples include;
- Certificate templates
- Infographics
- Illustrations
- Logo templates
- Email signatures
- 3D painting
- Adobe Photoshop templates
- Adobe illustrator templates
- Adobe Lightroom Presets
- social media graphics
- Text effects and letters
- Textures
- UI elements
- Vectors
- 2D concepts
- 3D generators
- 3D models
- Animation data
10. Applications
Web applications are also popular when it comes to digital products. Computer scientists, as well as software engineers, can leverage this opportunity to create some interesting applications.
Examples include;
- Automation software
- email marketing automation software
- social media automation software
- Order management software
- CRM software
- Cloud storage
- Contact management
- Dating
- eLearning
- Recipe and cooking
- Help desk and support
- Project management
- Site builders
- Site monitoring
Conclusion
Creating and selling digital products is one of the easiest ways to make money online. This is because they are popular, and easy to create and distribute. One advantage of this business is the fact that they can be created once and sold repeatedly to different customers without having to replenish inventory. Supplemented with platforms that allow customers to access your goods at will, your online store practically runs itself. The low cost of production, low overhead cost, ease of storage, and numerous product options make this a viable option for new eCommerce businesses.
