From creating online courses to writing ebooks, selling digital products is quickly becoming one of the most popular — and profitable — ways for content creators and infopreneurs to earn a living today. Just check out the stats: by the end of 2024, the digital media market is set to reach a staggering $560B. That’s a massive pie!
Interested in earning your own slice and building your digital product business plan? Then read on and check out our Digital Product Business Plan Template. It includes step-by-step instructions, helpful writing prompts, and fillable tables that ensure you don’t miss a beat when it comes to creating a comprehensive business plan, so you earn the most out of your digital product offering. Get it for free!
How to create a business plan for your digital product store
- Define your digital product business
- Identify your target audience
- Determine the digital products you’ll sell
- Set up your online storefront
- Develop a marketing strategy
- Determine your operations and product development process
- Create a budget and pricing strategy
Step 1: Define your digital product business
Before you can start creating your digital products, you’ll need to cover the basics, which means defining your digital product business.
This crucial first step entails choosing your niche and defining your unique value proposition.
Choose your niche
First thing’s first, you’ll need to decide on your business’s niche. Why? Well, because your niche will dictate everything from what kind of digital products you’ll be selling to the type of customers you’ll be targeting.
From productivity to personal finance, there are seemingly infinite niches out there to choose from. Seriously, the amount of choice can be a little bit overwhelming. So, how does one “niche down” and decide on a single niche among the many?
Ultimately, the niche you choose will depend on your passions and your expertise (and the demands of the digital market — but we’ll get to that in a minute). When niching down, think about the topics that you’re interested in and knowledgeable about.
What topics do you love reading about or researching online? What topics do your loved ones ask you for advice on? Do you have a pile of self-help books a mile high? There’s on potential niche. Are your friends always asking you to give them an informal “Investing 101”? There’s another.
Once you’ve figured out the topics you’re passionate about, you’ll need to do some market research to determine whether your prospective niches can actually turn a profit. For this step, you’ll be conducting keyword research, using tools like Google Keyword Planner, to determine just how healthy and how competitive your niche’s market really is. If we go with the principles of economics (or just common sense), a profitable niche will be one with high demand and low competition. This means that there will be information gaps within your niche that are waiting to be filled.
Determine your unique value proposition
Next, you’ll need to define your business’s unique value proposition.
To get technical, a unique value proposition is a statement that expresses why your business and your digital products are better than your competitors’. Your UVP should be compelling, concise, and comprehensive, and should convey your digital products’ unique benefits and how they solve your audience’s problems.
That’s a lot of words. To put it more informally, your UVP describes the “secret sauce” that sets your business and offering apart from the rest.
Step 2: Identify your target audience
Now that you’ve determined your business’ unique value, it’s time to find your target audience.
Your target audience is the specific group of people who will most benefit from your digital products. Gaining a clear understanding of your target audience, from their demographics all the way to their pain points, is crucial to building your business plan. Why? Because these are the people that you’ll be tailoring your digital products and your marketing efforts towards.
In other words, if you want to earn the most out of your digital product business, you’ll need to create the digital products that will fulfill your target audience’s needs and solve their problems.
Conduct competitor research
To identify your target audience, you’ll need to conduct some market research — or, more specifically, some competitor research.
Here’s how it’s done. First, you’ll need to chart out your niche and compile a list of competing content creators. Next, you’ll do a deep dive into each of your competitors, scoping out their social channels and digital products offerings to gain an understanding of their product and marketing strategies. With all of this data, you can begin to puzzle out your competitors’ unique value proposition and target audience. Finally, you’ll analyze your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies in all of these areas, and describe how you and your products are different — or better!
An effective competitor analysis helps you understand which audiences competing creators are targeting and just how they’re going about it. The conclusions you draw during this research are useful to your digital product business for a few reasons.
First, they’ll open your eyes to any opportunities for differentiation, along with any potential gaps in the market that you can jump in to fill with your digital products. Secondly, they can help you identify (and, thus, target) audiences that you hadn’t previously considered, so you can expand your business’s reach — and grow your income.
Create user personas
Keep in mind that your target audience represents only a segment of your niche’s larger target market. This means that you’ll need to get precise when defining it. And you can do that with the help of a user persona.
A user persona is a tool that can help content creators better understand their target audience. To get more granular, a user persona is a detailed profile of your ideal customer. When visualizing your user persona, it’s helpful to think of your ideal customers as semi-fictional characters and of your profile as a “portrait” that includes information about your user’s needs, goals, behaviors, and more.
To create a user persona, you’ll want to write a detailed narrative description of your user using the qualitative data you gathered during your market and competitor research. These descriptions will include elaborations on your users’ personality traits, habits, pain points, lifestyles, attitudes, decision-making processes, and more.
So, you might be wondering whether creating a single user persona is sufficient for your business plan. It’s important to note that a persona represents only a subset of your business’s target audience. Because a single user persona only represents a fraction of the audience you’re trying to reach, we recommend creating multiple personas, each representing a different segment of your ideal audience.
Step 3: Determine the digital products you’ll sell
Now that you’ve defined your business and identified your ideal customers, it’s time to determine what kind of digital products you’ll be selling.
The type of digital products you’ll create depend on a few factors, namely the demands of your niche and the needs of your target audience. During this step, it might be helpful to think of your digital products as digital solutions that you’re providing to your customers. The most effective (and most profitable) digital products will always fulfill a need or solve a problem for your target audience, so keep their profile top of mind when plotting out your offering.
Of course, different digital products suit different niches. For example, templates (like to-do lists, planners, journals, and more) are the cornerstone of the productivity niche, as they’re designed to help users organize, manage, and implement tasks quickly and easily. On the other hand, educational products like mini-courses and tutorials suit the needs of niches like personal finance and personal development, where lots of complex information needs to be broken down and conveyed to an audience.
Today, there’s almost no limit to the kinds of digital products you can sell online. However, some are more profitable than others. Some of the most lucrative digital products are:
- Ebooks
- Templates
- Online courses
- Mini-courses
- Subscriptions and memberships
- Tutorials
- Guides
- Challenges
Want to create profitable digital products in minutes? You can with The Leap.
The Leap is an all-in-one creator store with features like an AI-powered digital product builder, a link-in-bio storefront, and a built-in email marketing suite. In other words, this platform enables you to build, sell, and promote your digital products from one place.
The Leap enables you to create a number of the best-selling digital learning products, including mini-courses, tutorials, guides, and challenges. Because it’s powered by generative AI, The Leap enables you to create these products (and put them up for sale) in just minutes.
The best part? It’s totally free to use. Try The Leap for free today.
Create and sell digital products in minutes using The Leap!
Step 4: Set up your online storefront
Now that you know what kinds of products you want to create, it’s time to set up your online shop. How else are you going to get those totally profitable products in front of your customers and flying off the (digital) shelves?
Luckily, you can build your online storefront easily with The Leap. Follow these steps to get started:
- Add your digital product to your store
- Edit your product landing page
- Set a price
- Customize your online storefront
- Share your online store
Step 1: Add your digital product to your store
When you use The Leap to create your digital products, the platform will automatically generate a sales page and add it to your online storefront. (How easy is that?)
If you have existing digital products or if you built your digital products on another platform, don’t sweat it. You can sell any digital download through your Leap storefront by simply pasting a link to the file, no matter where it’s hosted.
Step 2: Edit your product landing page
Creating a solid product landing page is crucial to making those digital product sales (and raking in that revenue). Why? Because, essentially, it’s your online storefront’s #1 sales tool.
Be sure to write compelling and informative digital product descriptions that really talk up your product’s unique selling points and benefits. You’ll also want to include eye-catching imagery that provides potential customers with a visual idea of your product’s look and UX.
Here’s an example of a product landing page from creator Kate Terentieva, who sells a mini-course on “How To Become a Creative Director.”
Step 3: Set a price
Determining the price of your digital products requires a little research and a lot of strategic thinking. We’ll get to that later in our guide.
For now, all you need to know is that your Leap storefront allows you to offer your digital products at three different price options, including:
- Lead magnet: Offer your product for free in exchange for your customer’s email address.
- Fixed price: Decide exactly how much you want to charge for your product.
- Pay what you want: Let customers decide how much they’d like to pay for your product.
Step 4: Customize your online storefront
The Leap provides you with a variety of customizable themes to choose from to give your online store a unique, on-brand look. You can also personalize your storefront by uploading your own profile picture and a cover image. To drive sales, you can even customize the button copy on your store cards.
Additionally, you can link out to your Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, and more using built-in social media icons.
To get a visual on what your Leap storefront could look like (and to get that creativity flowing), check out this example from creator Kate Terentieva:
Step 5: Share your online store
Once you’ve finished building your Leap store, be sure to share your storefront link with your audience. That means adding your storefront link to your social media bio, content descriptions, and anywhere else your audience might find it.
Want to launch your online storefront today? Try The Leap for free now.
Step 5: Develop a marketing strategy
At this point, you’ve decided on your digital product offering and set up your online storefront. Next, it’s time to figure out how to promote your digital product business. And that means creating a marketing strategy.
From email marketing to social media marketing, there are lots of ways to promote your digital products online. Here are a few of the most popular methods:
Promote your products through content
If you’re a content creator, the easiest and most intuitive way to promote your digital products is through, well, content! This involves developing a solid social media strategy.
If you already have a following, then you already have a built-in pool of potential customers for your digital products — all you need to do is create the content that will catch their attention. Don’t have an audience just yet? Then you’ll need to choose a social media platform (or two! or three!) and start growing one organically.
The social media platform(s) you choose depend entirely on your target audience’s preferences and digital habits. In other words, you’ll want to choose the platform(s) where they hang out and consume content. And speaking of platforms, plural, a great social media marketing strategy typically involves a combination of platforms in order to reach a larger portion of a given target audience.
As you grow your audience, one thing to keep in mind is the importance of authenticity. Online audiences can sniff out inauthenticity from a mile away. And once they smell it, it can be hard to win their trust back. That’s why it’s crucial your promotional content doesn’t feel like an ad and, rather, feels as compelling, entertaining, and educational as your regular content.
So, what’s the secret to creating authentic-feeling marketing content? We suggest creating content that’s thematically similar to the digital products you’re promoting. Got an investing mini-course on offer? Consider creating a short-form video with an investing tip or two. From there, you can easily insert a subtle CTA telling your audience that they can access more of your expertise on the topic by purchasing your digital product. This method is effective because it gives prospective customers a taste of your product’s value, which gives them more incentive to smash that “Buy now” button.
Build your email list
Sure, social media marketing’s great and all, but did you know that the humble email newsletter still remains one of the most effective digital marketing strategies?
That’s right: on average, email marketing generates a ROI of $36 for every dollar spent. With that in mind, you’ll certainly want to leverage the power of email marketing in your digital product business plan.
Email marketing is a powerful way to convert your followers into paying customers. On top of that, email marketing also gives you more control over your business. While your social media following is at the mercy of social platforms and their fickle algorithms, your email list is an audience (and a marketing tool) that you 100% own. And nobody can take that away from you.
Before you can begin sending out newsletters, you’ll need to build out an email list, which is the list of subscribers who will receive your marketing emails. Luckily, in this day and age, there are tons of ways to capture your audience’s email addresses. These include adding opt-in forms to your link-in-bio landing page, website, and online storefronts, as well as giving away lead magnets and giving them away in exchange for your followers’ contact info.
Try paid advertising
If you want to invest a bit of money into your digital product business, try advertising it. As a digital product seller, there are a couple of ways to approach your paid advertising strategy.
First, you can advertise your products on social media through sponsored ads. From Instagram to YouTube, every content platform has some way for you to advertise your digital products. And a single sponsored post can go a long way! We suggest approaching your paid advertising strategy as an experiment with a smaller budget. Look into commissioning an ad or two for your digital products and see where it takes you.
Secondly, you can try out Google Ads. These ads get displayed on Google search results, on websites and blogs, and in a ton of other locations around the net. This means that Google Ads have the potential to give your digital products a ton of visibility. Google Ads also have some of the best targeted advertising tech on the market, which means that your ads have a better chance of reaching the people who will want to buy them.
Step 6: Determine your operations and product development process
Getting your operations in order is crucial to setting a solid foundation or your digital product business. This process involves choosing the tools and software you’ll use to run your business and, most importantly, outlining your digital product creation process.
Hammering out your product development process is threefold and includes establishing processes for:
- Research and development
- Design and production
- Quality control and testing
Need help developing your digital product creation process? Our Digital Product Business Plan Template ensures you hit every mark when it comes to establishing your digital product creation process, while helping you organize the rest of your business operations.
Step 7: Create a budget and pricing strategy
In order to set your digital product business up for success, you’ll need to get clear on how much money you’ll be bringing in and how much you’ll be spending. In other words, you’ll need to create a financial plan for your digital product business.
This involves projecting the amount of revenue your digital products will bring in over time, as well as determining your business’s fixed and variable costs, and your break-even point.
You can’t calculate any of this, however, until you’ve come up with your digital product pricing strategy. Creating a pricing strategy that aligns with you and your audience’s needs takes some strategic thinking and market research. On one hand, you’ll want to make your products accessible to as many potential customers as possible, however, you’ll also want to ensure you’re pricing your products competitively and not selling all the work you put into them short.
When it comes to pricing your digital products, there are three popular strategies to choose from. They include:
- Value-based pricing: Pricing based on what your product offers.
- Cost-based pricing: Pricing based on what you paid to make the product.
- Competitor-based pricing: Pricing based on your competition.
Need help developing your digital product pricing strategy? In addition to guiding you through your business’s financial planning, our Digital Product Business Plan Template helps you manage your pricing strategy, from your competitor research to deciding on your price tag.
Why should I sell digital products?
It’s simple: Digital products are a powerful source of passive income.
Ever heard the saying “making money while you sleep”? Well, that’s passive income. This type of hands-off revenue requires little effort on your part. That means you can earn money while focusing on other things — like creating content or taking some well-earned R&R.
So, how do digital products enable you to earn a passive income? When customers purchase your digital product, what they’re really doing is downloading a copy of a digital file. This means that you only need to produce your digital product once. After that, you can sell endless copies without having to lift a finger producing new “stock.”
Digital products are also relatively inexpensive to create and maintain, compared to physical products. Because digital products exist online, you don’t need to invest in expensive real-world solutions like a brick-and-mortar store or a warehouse. Instead, you’ll be building and selling your digital products with digital tools, like authoring programs and online storefronts, at a fraction of the cost.
Launch your digital product business today
And there you have it: everything you need to build and launch a successful (read: lucrative) digital product business. Now, it’s time for you to get down to business putting this guide (and our handy template) to good use and plotting out your roadmap to becoming a digital product mega-seller.
Build, market, and sell digital products all in one spot with The Leap!
Follow The Leap on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube for more monetization tips for creators. We also make a newsletter.
Further reading
- How To Sell Digital Products Online: A 6-Step Launch Checklist
- 15 Profitable Digital Products To Sell Online (+ Real Examples)
- 13 Best Examples of Digital Products Created on The Leap
- How To Promote Your Digital Products: 10 Ways To Boost Sales
- How to Write Digital Product Descriptions for Your Online Store (Tips + Free Template)
