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Digital products can be used in various formats like from music, videos, ebooks, online courses, and more. This popularity and ease of distribution has led many entrepreneurs to build entire businesses by launching digital product lines to complement the physical products and offer better services.
Digital products are in a competition of their own. They are pretty easy to distribute, can be replicated infinitely, and are usually simple to create. They allow you to solve other people’s problems and needs from the comfort of your own home. Selling digital products is one of the most suitable forms of online business for creative artists, educators, and freelancers looking for new income streams.
Companies of all sizes that are undergoing a digital transformation in order to stay ahead of the competition are not immune to this trend as well. Many online entrepreneurs built entire businesses around these immaterial goods, because of their popularity and easy distribution channels, or perhaps launched digital product lines in addition to the physical items or services they offer.
The true power to sell digital downloads lies in the fact that a digital product is created only once and can be sold millions of times to different customers without having to restock your inventory.
Any skilled individual is perfectly capable of creating a digital product worth sharing and selling. No factories, materials, or staff required. A computer, a sprinkle of drive and passion, and your creative mind is everything you need.
A digital product cannot be tasted, touched, or held - yet everyone consumes them on an everyday basis. From music to videos, e-books, and online courses, digital products are everywhere around us.
By definition, it represents a nonphysical asset or piece of media that can be sold and distributed repeatedly online. Digital products most commonly come in the form of streamable or downloadable files, such as PDFs, MP3s, video formats, templates, and plug-ins.
Generally speaking, digital products are easy to create, cost almost nothing, and are one of the best ways to generate top-notch income. They also give you the possibility to come up with additional products for your existing customer base, generating even further income without having to do any additional marketing.
Creating such products come with numerous benefits and advantages that make them uniquely attractive to sell:
eBooks are still the buzz these days, mainly because of the ever-growing digital publishing industry that grew to nearly $18 billion in the US. Part of their popularity is owed to their easy consumable nature thanks to e-readers like Amazon Kindle and Kobo. Also, they are quite easy to produce as you can share almost anything you know, or are passionate about, in written text form.
Another option here is the online courses that are best suited for in-depth content. Even though they require effort upfront such as creating a presentation or recording a video walk-through, know-how courses will never fade from the online world.
There is a global natural system of licensed digital assets uploaded by professional creatives for other creatives to use their work. By offering licensing rights to individuals or businesses, you can charge for the use of your photographs, music, and videos in your own store or through specialized eCommerce platforms.
If you decide on selling some of your work online, be sure to protect your digital products with the required watermarks and other relevant security measures.
Another growing industry in which you can be a part is the software industry, with companies around the globe expected to spend around $503 billion on enterprise software in 2020. These numbers have a tendency to only go up, making it obvious that if you can write code - you can pretty much sell it.
Software is practically any solution or service that is powered by code and it comes in many different forms such as desktop software, web-based apps, mobile apps, or themes and website templates. If you have ideas and knowledge that can potentially solve problems, you might develop profitable products to sell online.
Even though with services your “inventory” is limited to the number of working hours you can accommodate, they tend to pair well with digital products mostly because of their opposite nature. In addition, customers often receive digital products as part of their purchase with many services.
As an example, a personal fitness trainer might deliver a workout plan as a digital product. With this in mind, you can position certain services as packages containing profitable digital products. You can always offer your expertise & services in a form of a downloadable product.
Game developers might take advantage of the ability to sell their digital products directly to their customers.
The traditional distribution channels come with pros and cons, the cons being directly connected with profit-sharing obligations to the intermediaries or publishing studios. By offering their products on e-commerce platforms, game developers get to protect their profit margin and keep the revenues.
These products can also come in the form of nonphysical tools that help professionals to do tasks that fall outside of their skillset or take up an enormous amount of time. If you have the skillset to develop one, you can sell your digital solution to a specific audience that will find great use of your template/tool.
Such are resume templates for job-seekers, product mockup files for entrepreneurs, software for businesses, icons, fonts or UX Kits for web designers and many more.
If you are a professional musician or an artist, you have probably already explored how you can monetize your talents or perhaps the audience you are constantly building.
Have you ever considered that as a musician you can sell ringtones of your music, or that an artist can turn their art into purchasable phone wallpapers? If not, you can experiment with different formats to see what your audience wants without much risk through digital products such as those mentioned above.
Without the need to hold inventory and without selling physical products, businesses based on digital products can be tested and launched with little risk. With a little upfront investment of time and your skill, you can come up with an irresistible value that can pay for itself over time. Plan your perfect project, execute, and deliver!
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This post was submitted by a TNS experts. Check out our Contributor page for details about how you can share your ideas on digital marketing, SEO, social media, growth hacking and content marketing with our audience.
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