How to get started with digital products: Create, market and sell

This article will guide you through both challenges. We'll kick off by revealing a wealth of digital product ideas to help you start earning right away. Then we’ll share practical tips for selling and promoting your product using MailerLite. 

Digital products are non-physical goods that can be sold online and delivered electronically, often via email or download. Some of the most common examples of digital products include ebooks, courses, design assets, audio, templates, and printable files. 

Digital products have many benefits.

There are many reasons to sell digital goods over physical ones! If you need a little persuasion, here are 8 of the biggest:

1. Your inventory will never run out: Say au revoir to supply and demand issues. You can sell your digital product again and again.

2. You can scale sales easily: It’s easy to sell more products without worrying about your supply chain or increasing production. 

3. Your startup costs are low: You don’t need investments and shareholders to get going. Just create a product that makes sense with your budget.

4. You enjoy more freedom and flexibility: You aren’t tied to a single location when selling digital products. You can do it from anywhere in the world. 

5. The process can be quite passive: Once you’ve set up a marketing funnel and a way of delivering the product, you won’t have to spend any time packaging and sending out orders. 

6. You can add an extra income source: Service providers like freelancers, agencies and coaches can sell digital products to reduce their reliance on trading time for money. Plus, digital products can act as a lower-cost way to access your expertise.

7. You can reach a wider market: People all over the world can buy digital products. You can also create multiple products at various price points to make your business open and accessible to everyone.

8. People love digital products: Consumption of digital goods is increasing! Deloitte found that digital goods and services accounted for 2.7% of consumers’ spending, compared with 3.9% for clothing and 3.5% for electronics.

If that isn’t love at first sight, we don’t know what is! Digital goods give you an extra source of income while allowing you more time to focus on other things, like the next opportunity for your online business.

Now that you’re hyped up about how great digital products are, it’s time for us to show you the best digital product ideas!

Our list includes ideas for 16 different industries. If your industry isn’t on the list, we hope you can get inspired and find ways to apply the ideas to your area of expertise.

Digital products are a great way to monetize the audience you have built up through creating content. Remember that the digital product must hold more value than what you’re already sharing for free—so make it good!

Here are some ideas for content creators: 

1. Digital guides: Create a guide relating to your area of expertise and offer it to subscribers as a digital download. 

2. Mini courses: Break down a topic you know well into short, focused lessons—delivered by email or hosted on a simple platform. Great for teaching skills in bite-sized, actionable steps. 

3. Paid newsletters: Set up a paid newsletter that goes deep into the topics your blog discusses. Use your free newsletter to drive signups and traffic.

For example, Neoseed.io shares 2 business ideas in its free newsletter, plus 2 more in its paid one. The founder promotes the paid ideas in every free newsletter to convert readers into subscribers.  

Enter the world of gigs, freelancers and digital nomads. Every freelancer picks up plenty of knowledge on their journey that can be packaged up into a digital product to help others. Once the product is ready, freelancers can use email marketing to promote it.

4. Beginner’s guide to freelancing: Write an ebook on how you started freelancing.

5. Proposal templates: Share customizable templates you use to pitch clients, including sections for pricing, scope, and timelines. Saves time and helps other freelancers win more work.

6. Online community: Create a community around your area of expertise and charge people a fee to join it.

If you’re a counselor, life coach or wellness expert, you can use digital products to help a wider audience. 

7. Meditation audio: Sell 10-15 minute audio recordings of meditations and mindfulness exercises. 

8. Video courses: Create a video series of coping strategies, grounding techniques and wellness tips. 

9. Printable journals and wellness trackers: Help clients plan and keep track of their goals with digital resources like journals, trackers and worksheets based around your service.  

Graphic design skills are always in demand. And so are design-related digital products. Here are 3 digital product ideas for designers. 

10. Presentation templates: Give your customers a presentation design that stands out.  

11. Design sets: Sell your designs as t-shirts via a print-on-demand service. Or turn them into icon or font sets for their website or landing page. 

12. Create a website design checklist: Help other designers keep clients happy by creating a checklist they can use to ensure any work they hand off meets a high standard. 

Developers are in high demand! In today’s digital economy, an increasing number of products require software development. Here’s a list of digital product ideas for developers.

13. Apps: Once you’ve designed your mobile app, you can either add a paid plan or in-app purchases. 

14. Website themes: Sell premade themes that customers can download and use on their website.  

15. Integrations: Build a plugin that integrates with another popular tool or SaaS platform and solves a problem that the main tool hasn’t yet solved. You’ll have an instant audience of people ready to buy your product. 

Business owners and entrepreneurs have plenty of useful knowledge and expertise! Share your business hacks and strategies using the digital product ideas below. 

16. Resume templates: Sell CV templates to help your customers get hired. 

17. Job newsletter: Create a weekly paid newsletter that sends out the best job opportunities in your industry. 

18. Online communities and resources: Create a community to help people in your industry connect. For example, NoCodeFounders is a community with courses to help non-technical founders grow their business ideas.

Calling all writers! You have 2 options for digital products: either sell your writing or create digital products for other writers. Here are some of our top ideas. 

19.  Private proofreading community: Set up a private community where writers can share their projects and give each other constructive feedback.

20. Self-publishing guides: Many writers are interested in self-publishing, but feel overwhelmed by all the steps needed for a successful launch. If you’ve already been through the process, share what you learned.  

21. Deleted chapters, spin-offs, short stories and extra scenes: Capitalize on the popularity of a book by publishing extra story snippets for your readers to buy. Sell it as a direct EPUB file or via Kindle.

Check out this article for more on book marketing. We define what makes a successful launch and then introduce a 3-phase strategy you can replicate for your next book.

Thanks to the internet, artists can sell both physical products like prints and canvases, and digital art and digital downloads. Here are some of our favorite digital ideas.  

22. 30-day email course: Teach your audience how to tap into their creativity and explore the creative process in a 30-day series of emails. 

23. Printable coloring sheets: Turn your artwork into a coloring sheet for customers to download and print.

24. Designs: Make these relevant to your expertise. If you can sew, share the patterns you use. Or, if you’re a sculpting expert, share your designs. 

In this example, Erin Ford sells sewing patterns that people can use to create their own 2-piece skirt and top tube set.

Take your expertise out of the salon and get it online! People love to know about top products, makeup techniques and the latest beauty advice. Here are some ideas: 

25. Home recipes for healthy skin: Create a downloadable ebook with home remedies for skincare. 

26. Hair and makeup tutorials: Video courses are crazy popular. You could set up a subscription series, where customers receive a new tutorial every week. 

27. Certified courses: Let your customers become qualified beauty experts! You could run an online course teaching people your area of expertise.

If you’re a parent or work at a school or a kindergarten, you know the value of anything that will keep the (darling) little monsters entertained! Here are some ideas to try. 

28. Printable games and riddles: Create games such as crosswords, word searches, or mazes. 

29. Kids’ audiobooks: Write a short story and record yourself (or a voiceover artist) reading it, then sell it as an audiobook. Perfect for children to listen to in the car, or before bedtime. 

30. Guides to common challenges: Sell an ebook or guide to a common parenting challenge like teaching kids to read or getting them to sleep on time. The parents in your audience will thank you for it! 

Calling all chefs, cooks and food lovers! Share your culinary knowledge and experiences with the world using these hot digital product ideas.

31. Nutrition plans: As we grow more health-conscious, everyone is on the lookout for wholesome and nutritious meal plans. 

32. Recipe ebooks: Don’t keep your recipes a secret! Create an ebook and share the joy with your customers.

Musicians can access a huge market thanks to the Internet. By selling digital products, you’ll remove some of your reliance on streaming companies and live events for income. 

33. Downloadable songs: Sell your songs online, with different pricing for personal or commercial use. 

34. Sound effects: Sell sound effects to video and music creators.  

35. Beats: Create beats and sell them online so people can use them in their own songs.

Read this article for tips on digital marketing for musicians. We cover 7 simple strategies and offer a free marketing plan you can use for your next release. 

Get your customers’ heart rates pumping with these fun digital product ideas! You could also share teasers of your workout videos and meal plans on your social media account to attract new customers. 

36. Weekly workout video subscription: Release a new workout video every week to keep your customers on their toes! 

37. Meal-prep plans: Give your clients a little help in the kitchen with some healthy recipes and meal plans. Share them weekly in a PDF, or put everything together into an ebook. 

38. Workout plans: Create a program that helps your target audience achieve their goals. Increase value by adding a community or instructional videos.

A photographer’s skillset is highly sought after in pretty much every field! Whether you specialize in weddings, business events or cat food advertisements, you can create some awesome digital products. 

39. Photoshop presets and filters: Help your customers find the perfect look for their social media page or website, with premade presets and filters. 

40. Stock photos: Deliver high-quality stock photos to your clients’ inboxes every month. Focus on a specific niche and promote your images to businesses that need authentic photos. 

Video content is one of the most popular digital products. If you’re a videographer, think about selling some of these digital goods. 

41. Video animation intros: YouTubers will go crazy for premade introduction templates that they can add to their videos. 

42. Stock video: Maybe you filmed a battle reenactment or footage of a rare animal. Other videographers will be keen to get their mitts on them, so why not sell them as stock footage?

43. LUTs and presets: Sell preset video colors that other videographers can use to improve their content.

Travel and tourism is a huge industry, worth approximately 9.9 trillion USD in 2023! If you’re a seasoned traveler, work in the industry, or have expert knowledge on a specific country or region, you can put that expertise to good use and make some extra cash with a digital product.

44. Trip plans and itineraries: Planning a trip can be stressful, so much so that some travelers would love a ready-to-go itinerary that saves them the hassle. 

45. Travel budget templates: Create a spreadsheet that travelers can customize and plan their trip budgets with. 

46. Travel guides and e-books: Share your insider knowledge, tips, experiences, and recommendations so that other travelers can make the most of their trips.

Before you can start creating digital products to sell online, you need to decide which products best fit your industry, expertise, and audience. 

You’ll also need to consider what your budget, resources and time will allow. Creating a single digital resource like a template won’t necessarily require ongoing work. But something like a podcast, which involves regularly creating new episodes, will require a significant amount of time to create. 

All of this is to say that as much as you might like the idea of a certain digital product, there are lots of factors to consider when it comes to whether it’s right for you and your audience. Here are some tips for deciding which product you should start selling.

1. Brainstorm digital products that fit your industry

You probably already have a few ideas for potential products—jot them down and think of as many as you can. To help you get started, think about:

• What gaps are there in the market that you could fill with a digital product?

• What pain points have you resolved with your own solutions that could be useful to someone else?

• What pain points does your target audience regularly face?

• What are you passionate about that you could channel into a highly valuable digital product that people want to buy?

• Which digital products could complement your brand, existing content, or other products?

Here are 3 strategies you can use to create a product your audience will love. 

Create products around what you already know

What are the things you spend all day thinking about? Or, the things that people often ask you about? These are topics that you could quickly create a product around and that would be valuable to other people. 

See our social media manager Kinga discuss this strategy in further detail in the Instagram reel below. 

Research your target audience

To support and develop your ideas, look to your followers, subscribers, existing customers and target audience for insights. 

This could involve reading or taking part in discussions on platforms such as Reddit or in other online communities, sending a survey to your newsletter subscribers, or engaging with your audience on social media. 

You can also use tools like Google Trends and Keyword Planner to check the search volume for terms related to your ideas to see how popular they are.

Analyze your competitors

Your target audience is similar to, if not the same as, your competitors’ target audiences. A good way to understand what types of digital products they are consuming and are interested in is by checking what your competitors are offering. 

This will also allow you to look for gaps in the market or find opportunities to create digital products that are more valuable. What’s more, it will help you to decide how to price your products.

2. Develop your pricing strategy 

There is a lot to consider when defining the pricing of your digital products. Different types of products will require different payment models—some options to think about include:

• Straight sales of single products with one-off payments. For example, for an e-book or template

• Package or bundle options with multiple products for a one-off payment. For example, icon packages or a collection of courses or guides 

• Monthly or yearly subscriptions. For example, for paid newsletters, podcasts or communities

• Membership fees for access to a library of resources. For example, graphics or stock images

It should be fairly clear whether or not your product should be sold as a subscription or a one-off sale, but you might want to play around with various subscription tiers and packages to discover one that works.

Competitor research

Researching competitor pricing can give you a good starting point for your own pricing. You might think that you should go straight ahead and undercut them to attract more customers, but that’s not necessarily the best idea. 

Pricing your product higher can make customers perceive your products to be of higher quality or provide more value. Think about whether your digital products include anything that your competitors don’t. If you offer more value, you might be able to justify a higher cost. Find the right balance between value, customer satisfaction, competition, and profit margin.

Don’t be afraid to price your products higher if that’s what you think they deserve.

Consider your running costs  

It’s easy to get carried away while imagining all the money you’re going to make with your digital product! After all, there’s no inventory to purchase or investments to make, meaning profits can be sky-high. 

While that may be true, and digital products are a great way to earn extra income, there are still additional costs to consider before settling on your pricing. These include:

• Payment fees

• Marketing costs including software and tools

• Advertising

• Hosting

• Marketplace fees (If selling through a marketplace)

3. Choose a platform to sell your product

The final step is signing up for a platform that will help you accept payments and deliver your product. 

We recommend MailerLite since it’s packed full of tools you can use to earn online. This includes the ability to create and sell digital products and promote them in email campaigns, landing pages and on your website. 

Plus, MailerLite doesn’t take any commission, so you keep all your hard-earned profits other than the fee from the secure payment processor Stripe. 

Start by signing up for a free plan. This lets you create and sell a digital product without spending a cent.

Once you’ve joined, head to the Products tab in your dashboard and click Create product. From here, you can add a product, pricing and payment details, and either upload a file or add a URL where people can access the product. 

You’ll then be prompted to connect your Stripe account or create a new one. This is free and super easy to do, just follow the onscreen steps. 

Once you’ve created your product and linked Stripe, you’re ready to start selling. Share the checkout link with your contacts or add the product to email campaigns, automations and landing pages. 

You’ve developed an awesome idea into a real product, done your research, and set a price—you’re ready to start selling! But how do you get your digital product in front of your target audience and start making sales? Let’s dive into how to create your digital product marketing strategy.

1. Create a brand

If your digital product is simply an addition to your existing brand you can obviously skip this! But if you’re just starting out or looking to create a distinct side hustle, you’ll want to create a brand to go with it.

While branding might immediately conjure up ideas for logos, brand names, and colors, there’s a lot more to it than that. Your brand is your business’s identity and personality—it’s what distinguishes you from your competitors. 

When creating your brand, you need to:

• Define your core values

• Align your brand personality with your target audience 

• Create communication guidelines and craft a brand voice

• Create a visual identity through colors, imagery and typography

Want to learn more about how to develop your brand personality? This guide is for you. 👇

2. Build a website

Even if you decide to use a third-party e-commerce platform to sell your products, it’s still a good idea to have your own website you can use to build your brand and market your products.

With a website, you’ll be able to attract potential customers and advertise your products to them as well as create content that highlights and explains the benefits of your products. 

There are tons of platforms you can use to get started with building your own website, even if you have no coding skills.

Mailerlite includes a user-friendly website builder that also has features you can use to easily start selling your digital products. So you can get an awesome new website and email marketing all in one.

3. Add your product to marketplaces

If you don’t want to create a website or want to maximize your visibility, you can sell digital products on third-party platforms. Some of the most popular ones are Gumroad, Amazon, Udemy, and Etsy. You can even sell digital products on eBay! 

These online marketplaces offer a centralized platform that attracts a large, diverse audience, making your digital products more accessible and reducing barriers to purchase. Since they also often promote discoverability through search and recommendation features, they can also significantly expand your potential customer base.

If you choose to list your digital product on an online marketplace, you can also take advantage of their built-in marketing tools and analytics. These can help you to find opportunities to optimize your listings and reach your target audience more effectively.

4. Launch with email marketing

Email marketing is important for marketing digital products because it provides a direct line to your target audience that you own. Unlike social media, which could be taken away from you at any moment, your email list is yours to keep. 

If you have an email list already, start by promoting your product to this list with an email campaign. If you don’t yet have an email list, you’ll have to build one. Consider creating a lead magnet, such as a micro version of your digital product, and offering it for free in exchange for an email address. 

When people sign up to receive the lead magnet, send them emails promoting your product. Ideally, you’ll create an automated sequence of emails that go out when someone joins. 

See this digital product selling case study for a replicable example of how you can use lead magnets and email marketing to generate sales of digital products.

5. Promote your product on social media

Social media allows businesses to build brand awareness and grow a community around their products. It facilitates direct communication with customers, making it a great channel to develop and showcase your brand personality and build long-lasting customer relationships. 

As well as promoting your digital products through social media, you can also gather immediate feedback and suggestions that will help you improve your offering, grow your business, and boost customer satisfaction. 

Customers love being connected with brands, so if you do it right—be authentic and truly care about engaging with your audience—social media can greatly amplify your brand visibility.

A simple way to promote your product on social media is to create a link-in-bio page that includes your product. You can then create related posts and tell customers to see the link-in-bio page for more information.

Alternatively, offer a free lead magnet in your link-in-bio and then promote your paid products once people join your list.   

Get started using one of our link-in-bio templates. You can easily customize each one to fit your brand. 

6. Run ads  

Running paid ads can quickly get your product in front of a large audience. 

Start by creating a landing page. designed to provide highly focused information about your digital product in an effort to convert visitors to customers. Well-crafted landing pages work because they address the specific needs of potential customers and provide a clear path to conversion. 

Include conversion-focused elements like countdown timers, limited discounts, reviews and testimonials. This increases the chances that people will buy when they visit your page. Check out this guide for more tips on how to create landing pages that convert. 

The downside is that paid ads are expensive and people who haven’t heard of your brand before are unlikely to buy a high-ticket product that will cover the cost. It can be hard to make a profit on your first sale. 

But, if you collect the buyer’s email address when they buy, you can promote your other digital products or services via email marketing. This will increase the value of each customer, helping make your paid ads profitable. 

For a deeper look at this strategy, check out our interview with Live the Creed, an online store that has had great success with this approach. 

7. Use SEO 

If you’re looking to build authority and trust with your audience and improve online visibility, SEO is your best friend. 

SEO involves optimizing your website, landing pages, marketplace pages, and social media accounts so they rank high in search engine result pages (SERPs). 

With an effective SEO strategy, you’ll get your digital products in front of people who are actually searching for related information or products. 

A simple strategy is to first brainstorm terms that people who are looking for a product like yours might search for. 

You can then use a free tool like Ahrefs’ keyword planner to see keyword volume and alternative keywords. Or check out our list of the best content marketing tools for more tools you can use. 

Choose the terms that have high traffic and low competition. If your website is new, prioritize ones that have low competition.

Once you’ve identified some terms to target, create website pages based around these terms. Include the keyword in the page title, URL, headings and page content. 

If you aren’t sure what to include in these pages, search for the term on Google to see what type of content is already ranking and produce something similar. 

If you're just getting started with SEO, learn how to grow your business with these beginner SEO tactics. 

Use these tips to encourage people who are interested in your digital product to commit to buying it. They’ll help you increase urgency, build social proof, increase customer value and boost conversions. 

Offer limited-time discounts

Urgency is an effective motivating tactic for getting sales over the line since people know they have to act immediately to get the offer. 

A good way to add urgency to your offer is to discount the price of your product for a limited time. You can then mention this promotion in your newsletters and social profiles.

Another way to add urgency is to limit the number of people who can buy the product at the specified price. Once you’ve sold the defined number of products, you put the price back up to the regular amount.  

Use customer reviews

Social proof is another effective way to boost conversions, since it shows prospective customers that other people have gained value from your product. 

Displaying positive reviews is a super effective way to gather social proof. The easiest way to get reviews is to ask for them! Set up a review-request automation that goes out in the days or weeks after someone buys your digital product. 

You can then add quotes or star ratings from your reviews to your digital product promotional material, such as landing pages and emails. 

Upsell & cross-sell effectively

One of the best ways you can earn more from digital products is to upsell and cross-sell other products to people who have already bought from you. The key to making this work is having multiple products that are attractive to a specific buyer. 

These products could solve different parts of the same problem. For example, you could sell a course on email marketing automation and one on email marketing list growth. 

Alternatively, they could solve different problems faced by the same customer. For example, you could sell a course on email marketing and one on social media marketing.

Finally, you could solve the problem in different ways and at different price points. You could offer a low-cost guide to email marketing automation, a mid-priced course, and then a high-ticket, done-for-you email marketing automation set-up service.

Recover abandoned carts

Abandoned cart emails are automated messages sent to shoppers who added items to their online cart but didn’t complete the purchase. These emails remind them of the products they were going to buy, prompting them to complete the purchase and allowing you to recover lost sales.

Abandoned cart emails are super effective since they go out to people who are already very close to buying. And since you can automate the entire process with email, it doesn’t require any effort on your behalf after the initial setup.  

Read more about abandoned cart emails and how to set them up here. Or skip ahead by using our prebuilt abandoned cart automation template.

Here are 7 more common questions that people have about digital products. If you still have questions after reading, head to the comments section at the end of this article and let us know. 

1. What are the most profitable digital products?

Since digital products don’t typically have high production costs, the most profitable digital products are the ones that:

• You can sell for the highest price

• You can sell to a large audience

• Have low ongoing maintenance costs

Some examples of digital products that fit these categories include online courses, data or industry reports, and time-saving templates. 

2. Can you make money by selling digital products?

Yes, plenty of businesses make money selling digital products. You just need to create something that people find valuable and then create a strategy to get it in front of these audiences. 

3. Is selling digital products oversaturated?

Competition in digital products is the same as competition in any other product category: Some areas are saturated, but there’s always room for new and innovative products that either solve a new problem or solve an old problem in a new way. 

4. Can I sell digital products without a website?

You can! The 2 best options are to sell your digital product via a marketplace like Etsy, or to sell it via a tool like MailerLite that allows you to create products and accept payments. 

5. Are digital products passive income?

Once you’ve created a digital product and set up an effective sales funnel, it’s possible to keep selling it without much extra effort. But, you’ll still need to work on other aspects of your business, such as growing your audience, so you have new people to buy your product. 

Well, there you have it! We’ve been through the ideas for your next digital product and given you a game plan on how to get started. Today’s the day you create your digital product and generate passive income!

What are your favorite digital product ideas? Let us know in the comments below!