How to Create and Sell a Digital Product?

The process of creating and developing a digital product involves several key steps, from ideation to launch. Each stage requires careful planning, creativity, and attention to detail to ensure the successful development and delivery of a high-quality digital product. Let's explore the various stages involved in the creation and development process:

1. Identifying the Target Audience

The first step in creating a successful digital product is identifying the target audience. Understanding the needs, preferences, and pain points of the intended users is crucial for developing a product that resonates with them. Conducting market research, surveys, and user interviews can provide valuable insights into the target audience's demographics, behaviors, and expectations. By gaining a deep understanding of the target audience, creators can tailor their digital products to meet their specific needs and deliver a superior user experience.

2. Market Research and Validation

Once the target audience is identified, thorough market research is essential to validate the viability of the digital product idea. This involves analyzing market trends, competition, and potential demand for the product. Market research helps creators identify gaps in the market, understand customer preferences, and refine their product concept. Additionally, conducting user testing and gathering feedback during the development process can provide valuable insights and ensure that the product meets user expectations.

Find your Niche

Identifying profitable niches for digital products is a crucial step in the process of selling digital products. To maximize your chances of success, it's essential to research popular digital product categories and analyze market trends and competition. By doing so, you can identify gaps in the market or find areas where you can bring a unique and valuable offering.

Start by exploring various digital product categories that are in high demand. This could include eBooks, online courses, software, graphics, templates, music, or even virtual services. Look for categories that align with your expertise, interests, and skills. For example, if you are a talented graphic designer, creating and selling digital graphics and templates might be a profitable niche for you.

Create a Persona

Understanding your target audience is crucial for successful digital product sales. Define your ideal customer persona by considering their demographics, interests, pain points, and preferences. Conduct market research to gain insights into their needs, desires, and buying behaviors. This information will help you tailor your digital products to meet their specific requirements and create targeted marketing campaigns to reach them effectively.

Back of the Napkin Market Maths

It's important to assess the potential profitability of your digital product idea. As a small creator you don't need to make millions of revenue, but you also don't want to spend weeks or months creating something just to find out there are 5 people who want to buy it. Also remember there's a different between the people that want to buy your product and the people you can reach to buy your product. Just because they are out there doesn't mean you can find them or they can find you.

Look for indicators such as the size of the target market, the willingness of customers to pay for digital products in that category, and the potential for recurring sales or upselling opportunities. You can use forums like Reddit or any of the communities from our list of marketplaces for digital products to see what people are asking for and even how many are looking for similar things.

Stay up-to-date

Remember, the market for digital products is constantly evolving. Stay updated with the latest trends and emerging niches to capitalize on new opportunities. Continuously refine and adapt your digital product offerings to meet the changing needs of your target audience. With a deep understanding of the market and your customers, you'll be better equipped to make informed decisions and achieve success in selling digital products.

3. Conceptualization and Design

This is where the digital product idea takes shape and involves careful consideration of the content, structure, and overall user experience. By investing time and effort into creating valuable and engaging digital products, you can attract and retain customers.

Outline and Structure

Start by outlining the content and structure of your digital product. This step helps you organize your ideas and ensures a logical flow of information for your customers. Consider the key topics, chapters, or modules that you want to include in your digital product. By creating a clear outline, you can avoid content gaps and ensure that your product covers all the necessary information.

The Creative Act

Once you have your outline, it's time to dive into creating the content for your digital product. Depending on the type of product, this could involve writing, recording videos, designing graphics, or coding software. Whatever the medium, focus on delivering high-quality content that provides value to your customers.

Writing is a common element in many digital products, such as eBooks and online courses. Pay attention to your writing style, ensuring that it is clear, concise, and engaging. Use headings, subheadings, and bullet points to break up the text and make it easier for readers to consume the information. Incorporate examples, case studies, and practical exercises to enhance the learning experience and make your content more actionable.

If your digital product involves visual elements, such as graphics or videos, prioritize creating visually appealing and professional-looking assets. Invest in design tools or collaborate with designers to ensure that your visual content aligns with your brand and enhances the overall user experience. Consider using high-resolution images, attractive color schemes, and well-designed layouts to captivate your audience.

Don't forget the (digital) Packaging

Packaging your digital product for sale is another important step. Consider the format in which you will deliver your product, such as PDFs, videos, or audio files. Each format has its own advantages and considerations. For instance, PDFs are easily downloadable and printable, while videos can provide a more immersive learning experience. Choose the format that best suits your content and target audience.

Additionally, organize and format your digital product in a way that enhances user experience. Use clear headings, subheadings, and a table of contents for easy navigation. Include a glossary or index if applicable. Ensure that your digital product is well-structured and visually appealing, making it easy for customers to consume and refer back to whenever needed.

By focusing on creating high-quality content and packaging your digital product effectively, you can provide a valuable and engaging experience for your customers. This attention to detail will not only help you attract customers but also build a positive reputation for your brand and increase the likelihood of repeat sales.

4. Testing

The trap many product creators fall into is to not test their product before launch. While it is easy to improve a digital product once it's been released, it's hard to fix a bad first impression, so we recommend a 3-3-3 testing approach: ask 3 questions to 3 people from 3 sources:

3 Questions

If this product didn't exist, what would you do differently?: This is to tease out how much value your product is providing. You want to see if there are alternative solutions or if it's just nice-to-have.

How would you search for this product online?: This question helps get an idea of how to market your product and which words to use on the website or product description.

Did anything take longer than expected?: If you've shown them the first version it's very likely that something that is absolutely clear to you is not at all clear to someone who hasn't spent a lot of time with it. Fix these issues with better documentation or restruturing things before launching to a larger market.

3 People from 3 Sources

Obviously these numbers are just guidance but it's the important part is you don't want to rely on any single person's opinion and also get feedback from a variety of communities. Members of the same community (e.g. an online forum) usually think alike, but unless that community is large enough to provide lot's of potential buyers, it's best to make sure it works for other communities too (but remember not to go crazy and create a completely generic product that works for everyone as that is much harder to market and get right).

5. Pricing Model Decision

An important step is to decide how you want to monetize your product. Each pricing type has different advantages and disadvantages that need to be carefully weighed against each other. Sometimes it can be helpful to ask your test audience what or how they would be willing to pay, but beware the answers may not be as reliable as you may think, but they can be good indicators.

• One-time Purchase: This model involves selling the digital product for a fixed price. Users make a single payment to gain access to the product's features and functionalities. This model is commonly used for software products, ebooks, and digital music albums.

• Subscription-based: Subscription models require users to pay a recurring fee at regular intervals, such as monthly or annually, to access the digital product. This model is popular for online courses, streaming services, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) products. Subscriptions provide a steady stream of revenue and foster long-term customer relationships.

• Freemium Model: The freemium model offers a basic version of the digital product for free, with the option to upgrade to a premium version for additional features or enhanced functionality. This model allows users to experience the product before committing to a purchase, increasing the chances of conversion. Freemium models are commonly seen in mobile applications, online tools, and software products.

It's important for creators to choose the monetization strategy that aligns with their product, target audience, and business goals. Some products may benefit from a combination of different monetization models to maximize revenue potential. Additionally, creators should regularly evaluate and adapt their monetization strategies based on user feedback, market trends, and evolving customer needs.

6. Selling a digital product

There are different ways to sell your new product:

Marketplaces

If you don't want to invest a lot of time into the setup of a webshop on your own website and just want to start selling the there are many marketplaces to choose from for digital products. A great advantage of this is they have marketing built-in, people are already searching for products there and your product will pop up in search results automatically. And these users are usually very keen on buying a product. The biggest disadvantage is that these marketplaces take a large cut of your sale to provide this service. Unless you are one of the top sellers in a particular category don't expect to get too rich here, but it can still be a nice side-business.

But even if you do later decide to add a webshop on your website or blog then having a small selection of your products on marketplaces for marketing purposes is recommend. You could for example list 1-2 items on the marketplace from a set of products that go well together. Add a text file to the marketplace download that let's buyers know where to find your website if they want to complete the set or get custom work done from you.

The actual listing on each marketplace follows different rules, some are stricter as to what they allow onto their platform, others take everything and let the market decide.

Selling via a third party store

If you have your own website, you could just create some product pages and start selling directly from there. There are a number of providers such as Gumroad, Digistore, eJunkie that let you sell products directly from your website. They will handle the checkout for you, ensure all the payment data is handled securely and fulfill the purchase, that is they will send a download link to your product to the buyer along side the invoice.

To add this to your website you just add a link to a page you made which also leads to the biggest disadvantage of this approach. Your customers will get redirected to the website of the third party store, which will not only look differently, but use different branding and may possibly even show products from other people during the checkout in order to maximize the sale. This can cause friction for your customers and may lead to people abandoning the checkout and not buying from you after all.

Creating your own Webshop with MinimalWebshop

If you have a website you probably already spent a lot of time creating your own brand, making everything look and feel just the way you want. This is a large part of your online personality and you probably don't want to keep potential customers on-site and on-brand when they buy products from you. That's exactly what MinimalWebshop let's you do.

It's a simple to setup webshop solution for your website or blog that integrates with a Merchant of Record like Paddle. Merchant of Records are the easiest way to collect payments for your products as they take care of the worldwide sales tax handling and remittance for you. You just get the money you made transferred to your account at the end of the month (minus their fee which is much lower than any of the first two solutions). It's well worth it to not have the headache and if you just want to sell your beautiful products.

The MinimalWebshop is a snippet you add to a page on your website and it will load in place and you can customize it to fit exactly the style of your page. Have a look at how well it interates into different website styles:

You can sign-up and get started today by yourself or feel free to get in touch with Alex who will help you through the process and get you setup for free.