Before you start

Before you start please understand that making money online is not as easy as you might have been led to believe. It takes a lot of work to get to a point where you can make money selling products or services online. In particular, it takes more work to sell your products passively online. But saying that it can absolutely be done. Let say you are a photographer offering your time for money in the form of photo shoots. Now with the power of E-commerce, you can sell your photoshoots as products on your website, have your customers pay 50% up front so you know you’ve covered your costs. then you can upload the client’s photos as a downloadable product with preview photos. When the customer wants their photos they check out their product from your website with a credit card. No more waiting for weeks or months to get paid after sending an invoice to the client.

Sell digital downloads online free

 

A great way to increase traffic to your site is to give away digital downloads at no cost. We do this here on this site via our free download of camera raw files. We publish a Vlog on your YouTube channel then put a link in the description to the raw files used in the video. This drives the viewer to your site which in turn can drive up your traffic and may even generate some affiliate link sales for you.

Digital products examples

Sell online courses

You can sell many different items on your website. But the most profitable items to sell are those that are finished products ready for delivery. That means products for money, not time for money. Try to move away from selling your services if you can because you will always be limited by the time that you have to offer. A product like a pdf course on how to take great headshots will be appealing to the marketplace and will sell over and over again.

Sell software preferences and plugins

Another easy product to sell is photoshop actions. All those actions that you love to use in your editing can be of value to your YouTube audience. Consider packaging these actions into an easy download with a nice thumbnail and sell them for a few dollars on your website.

Sell membership subscriptions

Sell membership subscriptions to your sporting club or organisation. Set the subscription to auto-renew and sit back and watch the dollars roll in. You can also sell members-only downloads. So a viewer has to join up with your website on a subscription but then they can receive members-only downloads that non-members cannot. Thus you are adding value to their membership plan.

Resell digital products 

Aside from selling your own products, you can sell other businesses products. This is called affiliate marketing. Basically, you sign up to an affiliate marketing campaign for a particular business then you advertise the product for that business on your website. When someone clicks on your add and then this click leads to a sale you make a commission. Its called passive income and although it can be a small amount to start with it can lead to a pretty nice amount over time as your website increases in traffic.

Most profitable digital products

The most profitable digital products are those that you own the rights to. Design a course yourself, license the images through a legitimate stock photo website. Publish the course then move on to the next one. Take a look at this video where these successful bloggers talk about this point.

Which Ecommerce platform should I use to sell digital products online?

You have a few options when it comes to Eccomerce but the 2 big players right now are Woocommerce and Shopify. We are big fans of Woocommerce because it is so robust, has great tech support and is infinitely customisable. What does it mean to be customisable? Well, let’s say you have a great idea that you want to start to take 50% credit card deposits for your services so you know you’ve at least covered your costs before starting a job. Now you’ll need a plugin for your website to perform this function. Woocommerce offers this function whereas Shopify is limited in its offerings so you are forced to play ball by their rules and restrictions. Restrictions are the last thing you want to have as an online entrepreneur.

If you take our advise and use Woocommerce you will need to learn Wordpress. Wordpress is the structure that Woocommerce is designed for. If you don’t want to go through the process of learning Wordpress and learning Woo commerce we have a solution for you. Here at Aus Digital Media we have a website management service where we take care of everything for you. You do what you do best and let us do what we do best.

Another great website platform that is easy to use and doesn’t require any website coding skills at all is Strikingly. You can build your own ecommerce website, blog, or digital portfolio in 20 minutes or less. Head over to Strikingly to sign up today.

Sell digital products online with PayPal

Pay Pal can be a great way to get started with online sales. To be honest we are not a big supporter of Pay Pal anymore as there have been a lot of issues with Pay Pal being so big now that they have lost the support that they used to give to their customers. But saying that it is a great way to start selling your products online. Pay Pal also offers a subscription payment service. Maybe start a membership site where people can join via Pay Pal subscription. As long as you keep offering value to your members they will keep renewing their subscription.

Sell digital products online with Stripe

Our prefered payment gateway for selling digital products and services online is Stripe. Stripe works well with Woocommerce. the plugin is free to install and you only pay a small fee on each sale you make. Both businesses and individuals can set up a Stripe account.

Follow up on your sales.

Now that you are making regular sales on your website you need to be following up on the customer satisfaction levels and trying to make repeat sales. We do this with automated emailing software. This software is amazing. Suggest another purchase, thank the client with a unique coupon code for another purchase etc. Each email can be set up with images and your logo etc. You can set the condition so that the email is sent 1 day or 1 week after purchase and entice the buyer back with an automatically generated coupon code for specific products or services that you sell. All the settings are conditional so you can set multiple emails to upsell related products and much much more.