Have you heard? The digital media market is set to hit a staggering $848.5 billion by 2027. The market for digital products is booming. And that means there’s no better time to take your own slice of that billion-dollar pie.
There are a few things you can do to boost your digital product sales to earn the most revenue from your business. In this article, we guide you through how to build the most profitable digital products and how to promote your products to supercharge your sales.
Click here to start creating and selling digital products with The Leap. It’s free!How to maximize your digital product sales in 3 steps
- Identify your audience’s pain points
- Choose the type of product you want to create
- Adopt a minimum viable product mindset
Before even thinking of marketing, you can actually boost your digital product sales by building profitability into your products from the jump.
So, how does one do this? With a little forethought, some market research, and the right mindset.
Take it from online educator Juan Galán. With his company IG Creator Academy, Juan helps other creators build and grow their businesses and brands online. Since launching his business in 2021, Juan has released three successful (read: profitable) digital products. That means he knows a thing or two about what does and doesn’t work when it comes to building profitable digital products.
Want to start building your profit-making products now? The best part is that you can do it in three simple steps. Read on as we walk you through each of them.
Want to dive deeper into Juan’s step-by-step process to launching your first digital product? Take his free mini-course.
Step 1: Identify your audience’s pain points
While you might want to get started creating your digital product right away, it’s important not to skip over your market research. The insights this step provides you are absolutely crucial to your digital product’s profitability, and keep you competitive within the digital product market.
When conducting your market research, you’ll want to hone in on two key actions:
- Identifying your audience’s pain points.
- Identifying which products they already use.
It’s important to remember that the most profitable products are built to address your audience’s needs or solve a problem. It’s also important to note that every audience is different. The digital products that work for one creator won’t necessarily work for you and your audience. In the end, by focusing on these two factors, you’ll figure out the most profitable type of digital product you can create for your specific audience.
There are quite a few ways that you can conduct market research as a creator entrepreneur. Here are the most effective:
- Ask your audience directly: You can do this by using Instagram Stories poll and question features, asking questions in your posts’ captions, and asking questions in your video content.
- Explore online communities: Visit Facebook groups, Discord servers, Subreddits, and forums and other places where your target audience hangs out to see what kinds of questions they’re asking and solutions they’re looking for.
- Check out the competition: Browse the comments sections of your competitors’ posts to see what kinds of questions their followers are asking.
- Conduct market research calls: Call current followers and past customers to ask specific questions about their pain points, their digital product preferences, and their experience with your content and digital products.
Step 2: Choose the type of product you want to create
Now that you’ve done all that good market research, it’s time to decide which digital product you want to create.
From templates to ebooks, there are tons of different types of digital products you can build. But, of course, the type of product you end up building will depend on the insights you gathered during your market research. Remember: the most profitable products will always address your audience’s needs and cater to their preferences.
Profitable digital products to create
Need some inspiration as you settle on which type of product to create? Here are some of the most profitable digital products currently on the market:
- Templates
- Mini-courses
- Challenges
- Online courses
- Memberships
Step 3: Adopt a minimum viable product mindset
Now that you know what type of digital product you want to create, it’s time to, well, create it! To make the process less daunting and to get your products flying off the (digital) shelves, Juan suggests adopting a minimum viable product mindset.
A minimum viable product is the simplest form of your digital product, which only includes the essential features. A minimum viable product mindset, then, stipulates that it’s better to publish your digital products as soon as possible rather than ensuring they’re perfect before launching them.
Publishing a minimum viable product not only saves you time and stress, it allows you to start earning money sooner. Following this model also allows you to collect valuable customer feedback before investing too many resources into your product. Once you’ve received that feedback, you can then start improving it to make it a better fit for your audience.
8 Ways to promote your digital products and boost sales
Now that you’ve made your digital products, you’ll want to market them. A successful marketing strategy will supercharge your income by extending your digital products’ reach and transforming your audience into paying customers.
There are a number of ways you can go about promoting your digital products. Read on to learn about some of the most effective ways:
- Create an online storefront
- Build an email list
- Offer lead magnets
- Promote your products with content
- Join an online marketplace
- Host an online challenge
- Ask for reviews and testimonials
- Partner with other creators
1. Create an online storefront
The first step to marketing your digital products is to create an online storefront. In addition to hosting your digital products, this website or landing page is where you’ll direct your followers so they can purchase your products.
Luckily, there are quite a few platforms on the market that enable you to build an online storefront that will suit your business’s specific needs. These include platforms like The Leap, which provides users with a mobile-optimized link-in-bio storefront, and Gumroad or Shopify, which provide users with ecommerce websites.
These feature-rich platforms allow you to create your virtual store from scratch, no coding skills required. Many of them also allow you to host virtually any kind of digital product, from templates to online courses, memberships to music and audio files.
Set up your link-in-bio store on The Leap today. It’s free!2. Build an email list
Despite the rise of social media marketing, email marketing remains the most effective (and lucrative) digital marketing strategy out there. Hard to believe? The numbers don’t lie: email marketing generates a ROI of $36 for every dollar spent, which is higher than all other digital marketing channels. All this means that email marketing is a great way to convert your audience into customers — and to boost your income.
To start leveraging email marketing to maximize your digital product sales, you’ll first need to build an email list. This is the list of subscribers (i.e. potential customers) who will receive your promotional newsletters and sales funnel emails.
There are a number of different ways to capture your followers’ email addresses and build out your list. As a creator entrepreneur, the easiest way to capture your followers’ email addresses is through your content. Begin by adding an opt-in form for your newsletter to your link-in-bio tool. Then, you can promote your newsletter through content, while driving your audience to the opt-in link conveniently placed in your link in bio or caption.
3. Offer lead magnets
Offering lead magnets is another great way to grow your email list and, well, generate leads — both which will boost your profits.
A lead magnet is a free asset or resource (often a digital product) that you offer to your followers in exchange for their email address. Because lead magnets provide value to your audience, they’re a great way to quickly grow your email list.
In addition to helping you build your email list, lead magnets also give potential customers a sample of your product offering and expertise. A good lead magnet serves as a high-quality example of the kind of value your paid products promise to deliver. This means your lead magnets give your audience a taste of your unique genius, getting them hooked so they’ll come back for more of your paid product offering.
Want to start offering lead magnets now? The Leap’s AI-powered digital product builder empowers you to transform your products into lead magnets to boost your email list — and your income. Watch the video below to see how it works:
4. Promote your products with content
Of course, for creator entrepreneurs, one of the most intuitive (and effective) ways to promote digital products is through content.
If you have an audience on social media, no matter if it’s big or small, you already have a pool of potential customers for your product. Once you’ve launched your product, all you need to do is let your followers know it’s for sale. And there’s no easier way to do that than through content.
Whether your platform is Instagram or YouTube, there’s one tip that all content creators will want to keep in mind when using content to promote their digital products and it’s this: don’t make your marketing content look like an advertisement. Keep in mind that your audience follows you for your unique genius (and can sniff out when they’re being sold something inauthentically), so you’ll want to keep your promotional content authentic, entertaining, and educational.
We suggest making your marketing content tonally and topically similar to your usual content, with a subtle CTA letting your audience know that they can learn more by purchasing your product.
5. Join an online marketplace
Want to supercharge your digital product’s reach? Then you might want to join an online marketplace.
Online marketplaces are ecommerce platforms where customers can search for and purchase products from third-party sellers. These platforms are effective marketing tools for two reasons:
- Their large user bases (i.e. large pool of potential customers).
- Their powerful search engines, which are designed to match those potential customers with your products.
By uploading your digital products to an online marketplace, you’re basically placing them in front of thousands of potential customers.
There are lots of online marketplaces designed specifically for selling digital products. Ultimately, the platform you choose will depend on your niche and the type of products you’re selling. Here are some popular marketplaces along with the niche and products they cater to:
- Etsy: for templates (like planners), printables (like thank you cards), digital art, knitting patterns, and more.
- Creative Market: for digital design assets, including templates, graphic and clip art, Lightroom presets, digital brushes, and more.
- Gumroad: for any kind of digital product.
- Amazon: for ebooks and audiobooks
- CodeCanyon: for digital assets for websites, including code, plugins, website themes, and more.
6. Host an online challenge
Hosting a challenge isn’t just a great way to engage with your following, it’s also a great way to turn them into prospective customers for your digital products.
Online challenges are effective marketing tools because everyone loves a live or limited-time event. In addition to that, helping your audience achieve a goal via the challenge gives them confidence in your expertise and makes them more likely to purchase your paid products.
In order to launch a successful challenge, you’ll need to keep three things in mind. First, you’ll need to set a time frame for the challenge. Ideally, this is anywhere between five to 30 days depending on your challenge’s purpose. Secondly, you’ll need to ensure people play the challenge by using your digital products or lead magnets. And, finally, you’ll need to ensure your challenge gives you the opportunity to upsell your paid products by the end.
7. Ask for reviews and testimonials
One of the most powerful marketing tools? Social validation. Look at the power of platforms like Yelp or Tripadvisor, which use ratings systems (i.e. social proof) to drive traffic to (or from) businesses like restaurants and hotels.
In marketing jargon, social proof is a phenomenon where people will copy the actions of others in a given situation. In your case, this means that high ratings and great reviews will make potential customers more likely to purchase your digital products.
Some sales platforms like Gumroad allow customers to leave reviews on your digital products. To get even more reviews, we suggest emailing or messaging customers to ask them to leave ratings and reviews on your products. You can even quote these reviews as testimonials on your products’ landing pages to bolster their credibility.
8. Partner with other creators
Want your digital products to reach a whole new audience? Then you’ll want to partner with other creator entrepreneurs when it comes to marketing your digital products.
Other creator entrepreneurs are effective marketing tools because not only do they exist in the same digital ecosystem as you and your products, they also hold considerable sway over a specific target audience. This means that when you partner with another creator entrepreneur, you’re essentially transforming their audience into a pool of potential customers for your product.
To get the most out of your partnerships, you’ll want to ensure you’re partnering with the right creators. The key is to creators with similar yet different audiences than your own. This means that your partnering creator’s audience should have the same pain points your product is designed to solve, but that your audiences don’t overlap 100% (otherwise you’re just singing — or marketing — to the choir.)
These kinds of partnerships usually work by way of sponsored posts, which means you’d be paying your partnering creator to create a post promoting your digital product.
Start maximizing your digital product sales today
So, we’ve given you the rundown on how to boost your digital product sales. Now, it’s your turn! Whether you already have existing digital products you’d like to sell or you’re still in the creation phase, you’ll want to start implementing the above steps and tips to start boosting your income.
Want to start earning more ASAP? You totally can with The Leap.
The ultimate link-in-bio store, The Leap comes with an AI-powered digital product builder, and is kitted out email marketing automation features. This means you can build, sell, and market your digital products all from one place.
What’s more is that The Leap’s AI-powered authoring tool is so easy-to-use that it empowers creators to transform their digital products into lead magnets, so you can grow your email list — and your income — faster.
The best part? The Leap is 100% free to use.
Want to start supercharging your digital product income today? Try The Leap for free now.
Build, market, and sell digital products all in one spot with The Leap!
How to maximize digital product sales FAQ
How can I increase my digital product sales?
There are two main ways to increase your digital product sales.
First, you’ll want to build profitability into your digital products. This means creating products that address your audience’s pain points and preferences. To do this, you’ll want to conduct market research into your audience’s needs before creating your digital products.
Secondly, you’ll want to market your digital products. There are a number of ways creators can promote their digital products including through content, by creating an online storefront, by joining an online marketplace, by partnering with other creators, by holding an online challenge, and more.
Which digital products are the most profitable?
The profitability of a digital product depends on a number of factors including your niche, your audience size, and your marketing efforts.
That being said, there are some digital products that are more in-demand and, thus, more profitable than others. These include templates, mini-courses, challenges, online courses, and memberships.
Want to start earning a profit from mini-courses and challenges? The Leap’s AI-powered digital product builder enables you to create them in just 30 minutes. Try The Leap for free now.
Interested in selling online courses and memberships? You can with Thinkific — start your 14-day trial today.
Build, market, and sell digital products all in one spot with The Leap!
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