Let’s just say it: Digital products are the crux of any true freedom-based business. Unlike services, you can sell digital products anytime, anywhere (literally) and even better? You can automate every piece of the process – from garnering leads to delivering your goods.
If you’re a service provider who’s ready to ditch one-on-one work (or at least stop relying on it as your sole income driver), digital products are where it’s at.
If you haven’t considered or started selling digital products yet, now is the time. Below, let’s explore five wildly compelling reasons why you should start selling digital products ASAP.
1) Minimal Overhead Costs (Which Equals More Profit!)
Real talk: Digital products require very minimal upfront investment. One of the biggest advantages of selling digital products is the significantly lower overhead costs than pretty much any other business model. At the end of the day, you get to choose how much you spend on crafting and delivering your digital product.
Do you want the fancy graphic designer, or would you rather shell out $5 for a pretty-good Canva template? Do you want to hire a ghostwriter, or can you have the VA you’re already paying to help you transcribe a few of your YouTube videos to give you something to work with? The choice is yours.
You literally get to decide your profit margins here. And I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that higher profit margins mean more money in your pocket–or more money to reinvest into growing your business. Either way, it’s a win, if you ask me.
2) Scalability
Digital products are an exceptional-with-a-capital-E way to scale. Here’s the deal-io: No matter what type of digital product you’re creating, you only need to create it ONCE. Then, you can sell it repeatedly–without (much) additional effort or cost–in perpetuity until the end of time. 😉
Unlike done-for-you work – which requires you to work with just one or a handful of clients at a time – digital products allow you to serve literally unlimited customers simultaneously. A customer in the EU can snag your online course and three minutes later somebody down the road can snap up another.
While this is obviously great news for your wallet, all of this also means that if you’re big on getting a specific message out to the masses and making a large impact, digital products can help in that arena, too.
3) Establish Your Expertise
Want to “get known” for something? Try creating a digital product about it.
Digital products provide an excellent opportunity to leverage your expertise, knowledge, and unique skills. Whether it’s an e-book sharing your industry expertise, an online course teaching a specific skill, or downloadable resources that provide convenience to your target audience, digital products allow you to monetize your knowledge.
When you collate, package and sell your expertise in digital form, you’re essentially establishing yourself as authority in your niche and creating additional revenue streams at the same time. You’ll start to see your name show up in Google search results tied to your topic – which means people will not only buy your products, but also start to reach out to you for opportunities to speak or be a guest expert on any subject you’ve created a digital product about.
4) Unlimited Cross-sell and Up-sell Opportunities
Another big bonus–especially if you’re on the brink of burnout or looking for a way to step away from the client-to-client cycle? You can sell digital products over & over (and over!) without needing to ‘show up’ and deliver anything. For example, if you’re a copywriter and someone snaps up your Website Template package, you don’t have to do anything you’d normally need to do if you were working together one-on-one: like email the client to set up a Discovery Call, show up for said Discovery Call and then knock out the client’s website.
Instead, you can simply collect the cash money. And because you don’t have to ‘show up,’ offering digital products allows you to cross-sell and up-sell with so much more ease, too. You can simply add options for order bumps, up-sells or cross-sells to your order form page and install a plug-in that ‘suggests’ related products in your product shop.
There are a million other ways to do it, too – from re-targeting ads on Facebook to email campaigns. Find what works for you & your business. Pick one to start and then expand from there.
And as someone who very much values freedom, I can’t gloss over the fact that this model also provides much more flexibility than delivering done-for-you work.
When you’re not out here feeling bullied by your calendar because it’s filled with a million Zoom coaching calls or a trillion client deadlines, you get to truly work with your own natural rhythms and do work that feels good, when you want to do it. It’s quite liberating – ask me how I know. 😉
Either way you slice it, digital products offer a type of freedom that services-based work never can.
5) Passive Income
Remember that whole “you don’t have to physically deliver anything” thing I was just talking about? It’s that part that makes digital products more passive than done-for-you work – and more compelling to busy business owners.
Passive income is the dream for many online entrepreneurs–and digital products are the easiest way to get there. When I say passive income, I mean income you don’t have to ‘actively’ show up for to receive. It’s not bound by your time or a certain number of hours in a day.
And that means you’re able to make money no matter what you’re doing (like lounging on a beautiful beach somewhere) or not doing (like sitting endlessly for hours at your computer desk).
At the end of the day, selling digital products can be a complete game-changer for women entrepreneurs looking to scale their online businesses–and the time to create one of the digital products from your lengthy Google Doc titled “product ideas” is, well, right now. Don’t miss out on the advantages of selling digital products–start exploring your options today and you never know where you might wind up a year from now! (It might even be a beach in Tahiti or simply that cute new cat cafe down the street…while still making money. #win)
