The internet has become an amazing place over the past decade. There has been a massive shift from buying things in department stores to buying everything online. Just look at your closest bookstore. I bet it was doing a lot better before Amazon released their Kindle… Now eBooks and digital downloads are getting more and more popular. So if you’re thinking of starting your own business or have one already and have been wondering how to sell digital products online then continue reading my friend!
How To Sell Anything Online, Not Just Digital Products
The same principles apply to whether your selling physical products that need to be shipped or digital products that you can just email to your customers, the marketing is all the same.
First of all you need to have a website. If you have one already, then great. If not, then you can get either get a free one to start off with, or purchase one through a domain registrar like Namecheap or GoDaddy.
Now you need to get people to your website. We call this “driving traffic.”
Getting traffic can be done in multiple ways. You can do PPC marketing, video marketing on YouTube and blogging. There are many other ways but that’s just a couple of the most popular ways to get traffic. The cheapest way, free to be exact, is to start blogging.
I’m not talking about a blog where you sit there telling your own stories of your life, well you could if you wanted, but more like adding posts to your websites targeting keywords that your potential visitors could be searching for on the search engines. If you’re wanting to learn how to drive traffic, I suggest you check out my #1 recommendation for success online. These guys show you ALL the different ways to get traffic to your website.
Digital Products vs. Physical Products – Which Should You Be Selling?
Both are good for making money online, but one has a better profit margin.
Like I said before, the switch to purchasing digital downloads if become more the norm in this day and age. A lot of people download eBooks to read on the Kindles or tablets, so you could sell an eBook too. You don’t need to have a publisher or anything to sell books in the Kindle Store on Amazon so what’s stopping you from writing a book and putting it up for sale?
If you have a bit of knowledge in something, go for it!
Physical products are a little trickier as there are more expenses involved. If you have a big product you have to think about storage, shipping and handling and the manufacturing costs.
Say you had a workout DVD series and complementary booklet. You can turn them into a set of 10 DVDs and sell them for let’s say $79. Now let’s say they cost $15 to manufacture (cheaper if you manufacture them in bulk but you are talking 1,000’s of units for it to be noticeable), an average of $1.50 for storage per set and $4.50 for shipping and handling. Best to offer free shipping because you could be missing out on sales just to lower your costs. So what would your total profit be per sale?
$79 Sale Price – ($15 manufacturing + $1.50 storage + $4.50 S&H) = $58
Now a digital product doesn’t have a manufacturing cost, or storage cost or shipping and handling cost. You can have 10 individual videos and the booklet could be a downloadable PDF too. Now let’s say you offer a $10 discount for the digital download version. Now let’s look at the math…
$69 Sale Price – ($0 manufacturing + $0 storage + $0 S&H) = $69
So you end up with $11 more per unit sold. This is just an example and the costs could be very different.
Even if you forget all that math, just look at the simplicity of the digital products compared to the physical. No worrying about storage of the products, no manufacturing costs and you can automate the delivery of the product by emailing the download links to your customer.
Much simpler! Me likey!
But don’t discard physical products just yet though…
How To Make Money Online Without Selling Anything… Really? Anything!?
Now we are entering the realms of affiliate marketing.
You can make money online without having your own products, but you can promote other peoples and get paid a commission. You can promote digital products or physical products.
Places like Amazon and eBay have affiliate programs where you get paid a percentage of the sales make from customers who you’ve sent to the respective sites. I have seen people make really good money from these and the benefit of being an affiliate is, is that you don’t have to worry about the manufacturing, shipping and handling or storage of any of the products.
They do it all.
Now the downside is that the commissions are very high. The highest I’ve seen is 15% on eBay and it’s 9% on Amazon. With that said, you could be promoting golf shoes on your website and if you sent someone to Amazon to buy a set of golf shoes buy they end up buying a new laptop bag, you still get the commission. You get the commissions for anything they buy, not just the product you’re promoting.
As for digital products, you can get paid up to 75% commission. That’s right, you can get 3/4 of the sale in your pocket and it’s not even your product.
Why can the product owners do this? Well like I showed you guys above, there are no costs to them to make it. So by offering a high commission, they’re more likely to get more people trying to promote their product and then they’ll make more sales. If someone send a customer to their site and they buy something, it’s like a free sale because they didn’t have to do anything to get that sale.
Say the product is $49. The referring affiliate gets 75% ($36.75) and they keep the remaining 25% ($12.25). Now that’s $12.25 they didn’t have to do anything for. If you have 10 affiliates sending you 1 customer who purchases their product, then that’s $122.50 per day they’re making for no work at all.
The Digital World Is Still Growing…
Digital products are my favourite things to sell and promote just because of the ease and simplicity of them. Figuring out what to sell is more difficult than how to sell it. Thankfully I found somewhere that helped me figure out how to sell anything online, not just digital products.
With over $200 billion being spent online in 2011 and a predicted $316 billion being spent by 2016 (source: Wall Street Journal) it’s definitely a good idea to get yourself online. Even if you have no product to sell, you can still get a slice of that massive $200 odd billion dollar pie. It’s delicious… Yum yum yum!
If you’re interested in starting your own online business then I have written a post about how you can do so. It is mainly aimed at those who don’t have their own products, but if you do, then still check it out as you’ll pick up more ideas on how to get a extra slice of that pie.
More and more people are shopping online and there is enough room online for everyone to get involved. So make the most of it and get in on some of this action.
Bring your game faces dudes and dudettes!
What do you think about this switch to the online world? Do you still wonder how you can make money selling digital products online? Leave your comments and any questions you may have below!
