Monetising - Digital Products

Well , basically , it's something that you can sell online , but it doesn't have any physical form . It has no substance . So , for example , an e-book . So if you've might have gone to Amazon and bought an e-book , you know it's delivered electronically .

You don't have a physical copy of the book , but you do get the book and you can read it on your Kindle or any other reading device . Things like an online course . You access it through your computer . You don't get any physical course materials . That's another digital product . Buying assets like photographs Again , that's a digital product .

If you're buying stock photography , digital product . So if you've ever bought an e-book or an audio book or downloaded and paid for an app onto your phone , then you've bought and consumed a physical product . So you know , you've probably been used to buying them on these big market places like Amazon or Audible or the iTunes Store .

So with a lot of these digital products . You've got a choice you can sell them on these big market places or you can actually sell them through your own website or through other specialist market places .

What many people actually do is , if they've got a website on a particular niche and they've devised a digital product that they can sell to match that niche , rather than building e-commerce facilities into their own website , they'll quite often just promote their product and then sell it via one of these market places . Market places are like teachable .

There's a whole huge number of them . If you just went and Google digital product market places , you'll find a whole load of options that you can look at . Now let's run through what some of the potential products are that you could produce . Probably the most obvious one is courses .

Lots of people create online course content and there's a load of platforms that help you do that , so you can deliver these courses via text , pdfs , or with video or audio . There's a whole bunch of options where you can deliver that digitally .

It's a great way if you've got specialist knowledge that other people might be interested in and you can take them through a journey on that and teach some particular courses and modules . A friend of mine she's an educational psychologist and she delivers training in person to schools .

She's got a marketplace of schools that can't afford for her to come in and teach them in person . She's limited to how many schools she can actually go and teach in any one month by the fact there's only one of her .

She's developing a course that she can deliver digitally that will allow her to sell to schools that can't afford for her to come in the first place . It will also scale much more easily than her going and delivering individual courses . So that's the kind of example where you can come up with a course .

Now you don't necessarily need to be something really clever like an educational psychologist . If you've got any skill which is transferable and teachable online , then you can teach that and create a course on that . So it doesn't have to be anything clever . I've seen people where there are carpentry courses . There are loads of online marketing courses out there .

There's courses on pretty much any subject you can think of . If you go out there , someone with skills would have made a course for it . So it's a great way of passing on any skills and making some income from it . The next one I'd look at would be eBooks . These are really great way of self-publishing and it's dead simple .

If you just want to sit down and write , then you can do it . I've actually created an eBook myself several years ago on the subject of training a puppy , how to deal with a puppy the first few weeks having a puppy . I wrote this because we had a new puppy at the time .

We'd just gone through that process and I've had dogs for years , so it was just a basic book to give basic advice to people on what to expect with a puppy and how to look after them . I've just published that on Amazon and I've sold now thousands of copies of that over the years . And the beauty of that is on Amazon they'll also do print on demand .

So , as well as it being an eBook , they'll produce copies of it . If people order the book and they want a hot and they want a paperback copy , they will actually print it and post it out to them .

If you want to see the book that I actually produced , just go to Amazon and search for Ed Dawson and annoyingly , I spell my name Ed with 2D , so that's Edd Space Dawson , and you'll see your first puppy . That's my book .

So , yeah , that's something that's easy to do and you can promote it on your website , or you could make that book free to download if you wanted to , if you just wanted to use it as like a lead magnet , which plenty of people do . They produce an e-book just to demonstrate their expertise and then use it as a lead magnet to bring on new clients .

The next digital product to consider would be photography . There are loads of stock photography sites where you can put your images up for sale and obviously you can promote them for your own website from that . If you have technical skills , there are things like website templates that you can create , especially for things in WordPress .

There's lots of WordPress plugins . You know you could create a WordPress plugin if you have those skills . I know that is quite niche , but not everyone's got those skills . Again , software programs that's another one that you can do if you have those skills or if you want to hire someone with those skills .

So if you've got a really good idea , you could just go to someone like Upworkcom and hire developers to do that for you .

It's a little bit more complex than creating a course or an e-book because , at the end of the day , most people have writing skills or can use AI to help them with writing , whereas software is a little bit more complex , but again , that is another very common digital product that some people make a lot of money with .

Going back to the less technical stuff , yeah , tutorials and guides that's probably a little bit lower down the ladder than a course or an e-book . I've seen people making good livings selling spreadsheets , so especially spreadsheets like doing tax calculations or profit and loss calculations , although any kind of specialist spreadsheet . I've seen people who sell those .

Another interesting one is printables . So you know , like if you look back at the example of an e-book where people can order a printed version , so digital product doesn't have to remain virtual , and so printables is one .

Things like agendas , schedules , planners , artwork , scrapbooking , assets , things like that , where people can buy it digitally and then print it themselves , whether these are print on demand service or use their own print to those kind of things . That's another one that's proving really popular . So that's some ideas of different types of digital products .

I mean there are definitely going to be more types . I've only really scratched the surface , but I've tried to cover the main ones there for you . If you went and did some of your own research , you will find more different types that you could do , but it should give you some food for thought on that . But why should you consider digital products ?

Well , we've covered in previous podcasts affiliate marketing and display ads as way of monetizing . Now they're great , but the downside of them is you never really have a customer . You know you're always driving just customers to other companies , who then a customer and resell to that customer . You don't have a relationship with digital products .

The great thing is , when someone buys off you , you'll get an email address . Then you can then build a relationship with that customer . You can potentially sell them other products down the line . You also get much more value off that customer than a simple affiliate or display relationship .

The great thing about digital products in themselves is , obviously you've got to create them , but once they're created , there's no inventory cost . You can just replicate them again and again and again . They can be downloaded again and again and again and again . You don't have to hold stock , so there's no cost to hold stock .

That's a massive barrier to entry for things like where people sell on Amazon , fba . It's great , but they have to pay and hold stock upfront , which is a massive cost . With digital product , you don't have that issue having to hold stock . So that's a real , real advantage .

The additional benefit of having to hold no stock is that you also never run out of stock . So , again , that's a massive advantage over a physical product . You also , obviously , it becomes passive income .

Once you have created a product and it goes off for sale , then it will just sell again and again , and again , and you don't have to do anything to facilitate that sale . There's no shipping , no fulfillment again , massive advantage . And this means it also scales , you know . So you haven't got to worry about how you scale out fulfillment or all those things .

It just will scale as much as you need . And the costs stock costs are really low and you can reach a really , really wide market .

You know , depending on what you're selling , you might be selling a really expensive service if you work with people in person , but if you sell them a course , it means you can reach people who wouldn't be able to afford you otherwise to work with you in person . So , yeah , real , real advantages .

So I'd strongly recommend that you look into digital products for your niche to get ideas . I just got there and I Google your niche . So , say , google digital products with personal trainers . If you're a personal trainer did Google digital products for musicians .

If you're a musician and you will find lots of examples of people creating and selling digital products in your niche and that might give you some great ideas on how you could develop a product that would fit within your niche that you could sell to people visiting your site .

If you're looking to develop ideas on digital products , obviously digital products themselves tend to answer people's questions or solve a problem for them . So if you look at the questions people ask online , go to keywordspeopleusecom .

You can search for the questions people asking in your niche and that can help you with designing courses , designing products and seeing where people need help that you can develop products around to solve . So I hope that's given you an intro to developing digital products to monetize your website . It's been fun just producing this and researching it .

It's definitely given me some ideas of more digital products that we could be creating at keywordspeopleusecom and our other websites . So , yeah , it's definitely an area and a space that I'm looking to do more in the future . Thanks for listening . I really appreciate it . Please subscribe , share . It really helps .

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I'm at channel 5 on Twitter or you can email me at podcast keywordspeopleusecom . Bye for now . See you in the next episode of SEO . It's not that hard .