This is a review of Online Selling Tactics. When I first began selling items on eBay, I discovered that it was a quick and easy way to make money online. It wasn’t complicated, and buying for cheap and selling them for a higher price was a basic idea that made sense to me. So I started to buy and sell clothes, and it worked!
Sell Digital Products
The market for digital products is exploding, and the rate of that explosion continues to grow rapidly. Online education has become a $15 billion a year industry. That’s billion, with a “b.” E-book sales exceed $5 billion annually.
And those are only two types of digital product!
A digital product is anything a buyer can download to his computer or consume online. At its heart is quality information, but most information can be presented in any number of ways. Here are some of the most familiar:
- E-books
- Audiobooks
- Emails and autoresponders
- Photos
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Webinars
- Live-streaming video from services like Blab or Periscope
- Online courses
- Software
- Apps
The beauty of digital products is that storage and shipping are never an issue. Once you’ve created a digital product and made it available for purchase and download, it’s totally scalable. It doesn’t require any more time for 10 downloads than it does for a single one… or for 1,000 or 10,000.
You can also take the same information and repurpose it to work on different media, then market it to a slightly different audience.
- Redo a series of blog posts to make it an autoresponder course, or an e-book.
- Take written content and turn it into a podcast or a video.
- Create a webinar from an e-book.
- Take an e-book in PDF format and turn it into a Kindle book to sell on Amazon.
- Turn coaching sessions into a video instruction series.
- Parlay some how-to articles into a course.
You can also turn your service into a digital asset. There are lots more ways to create digital products, though. Some are obvious. If you’re a photographer, you can sell your photos online, either through your own site or on a site like iStockphoto for stock images or Etsy for art images.
Sometimes your path isn’t quite so obvious, though. If that’s your situation, knowing your subject area and your audience is key.
Keep in mind that, whatever type of digital product you create, it must solve a real problem for your audience and give them a lot of value.
Before you spend a lot of time creating something, ask your audience. Find out what kind of information would be helpful to them, and whether they’d be willing to pay for it. Then determine the format that will work best.
If your audience learns by watching YouTube videos, don’t give them an e-book. If they like to consume content during the daily commute, audio is probably best.
Some people prefer to read. I hope you get the idea.
Start with a minimum viable product. That’s the simplest or smallest version of your offering. Once you know that’s working, you can expand on it, add to it, or make it available in a new format. Although it takes some time to create the product, but it is extremely scalable.
When you sell hard goods or digital products, or both, your business will grow. If you’d like to learn more about selling products online from your WordPress site, join SBI! for WP. It provides the tools and information you need to turn a website into a profitable business.