How to discover the best digital product to sell so that your audience wants to buy

You have your blog set up and you have been creating content.  You’re building an audience and now you are ready to start making some money with your own digital product.  But now you are starting to wonder, “What is the best digital product to sell on my blog?”

In this post, I am covering 5 ways to discover what your audience actually needs and wants so that you can create a digital product that sells like hotcakes!

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This post contains affiliate links.  Please see my disclosure page for more info

People like to complicate things, but making money online comes down to two really simple things:

1. Attracting your audience
2. Giving them what they want

If you focus all your activities on these 2 foundational things as you grow your blogging business, you’ll be successful.

What does my audience want?

Before creating any type of product you need to know what your audience wants. 

• What problem do they need solved that your digital product could help them with? 
• What’s going to get them from where they are to where they want to be?

You could create the most amazing digital product in the world but if it’s not what your audience wants it won’t sell. 

This is where market research and getting feedback from your audience comes into play. 

You definitely don’t want to guess and spend a ton of time creating something your audience does not want. 

Online entrepreneurs are continually making this mistake each and every day and I don’t want you to be next!  Trust me when I say that you will waste a ton of time and money (because time is money) if you create a product without any research or feedback. 

This will also kill your confidence fast because if you’re putting something out there that you worked really hard on and no one buys, it’s going to be defeating. Plus it makes it so much harder to get up and try again!

So, let’s get into 5 ways to find the best digital product ideas for your audience and help you answer the question- What should I sell on my blog?

What is the best digital product to sell on my blog?: 5 Ways to Find the Answer.

#1 –  Ask your audience

The first thing you should do is ask your audience. I know this sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many people don’t do this!

If you are getting ready to create a stream of income with your own digital product then you should already be growing some type of audience via an email list. 

Haven’t started yet? Check out my videos:

HOW TO BUILD AN EMAIL LIST FOR FREE: Why you need to start today!

HOW TO GROW AN EMAIL LIST FOR BEGINNERS: 7 Email List Building Tips

If you have an audience on social media you can start there, but if you are serious about building a profitable blogging business you are going to need to build a list that you own.   It does not need to be huge by any means, but if you don’t have an audience then it is going to be much more difficult to sell your product. 

Follow these other 4 steps below to get an idea of what your ideal reader is struggling with and really wants and then reverse engineer it. 

Once you know what they want, you can create a free email opt-in related to this to get them on your email list and create blog posts around the topic.

When you are ready to launch a product you will have an email list full of people interested in what you have to offer.   

If you have been building an email list then you can send a short email or survey asking them questions like What are they struggling with? What topics are they interested in hearing more about? Which format do they prefer to learn from- Video? Audio? Written content?  

Keep it simple- 2-3 questions max and then record the information in Google sheets or a doc.

#2 – Analyze your competition

Check out what types of digital products and services your competitors are offering. 

What are their price points?  How are they presenting their offers?  What type of copywriting techniques and language are they using?  This step is to help you gather ideas and inspiration- not to copy their work.

#3 – Utilize Social Media

Go into FB groups for your specific niche to see what questions people are asking.  Be a fly on the wall and record these questions and the words they use into your spreadsheet/doc.  

Use the autocomplete search bar on search engine platforms like YouTube and Pinterest to see what people are searching for within your niche. 

#4 – Check out marketplaces like Etsy and Amazon

Visiting sites like Etsy and Amazon can give you some really good insight into what types of digital products are selling within your niche.  

Check out the reviews section on Etsy to see what digital products people are buying most from a seller in your niche. Also, pay close attention to the good AND bad reviews on these sites to see what people are saying they like and/or dislike about the product. Record this in your spreadsheet/doc.

These reviews literally give you clues into exactly what people want. It is also how you could improve upon a product if you decide to create something similar (Again, no copying!)

#5 – Search content marketing websites

We talked about this a bit in my video about researching blog post topic ideas. 

Take advantage of sites like:

1. Answer the Public – Gathers the questions that people are asking on the Internet. It also organizes them by keyword for you. 
2. Check out BuzzSumo – Find out what content is popular and get the most shares within your niche. This can help you identify key pain points your audience has.
3. Utilize Google Trends – Identify the top queries and trends within your niche
4. Quora is a great site to see what questions people are asking related to your niche.  What pain points they have.
5. Reddit is another place you can go. Access subreddit communities related to your niche and gather info on what people are asking questions about and discussing.

* Bonus tip! 

Are you an affiliate for anything that your audience really likes and that is giving you frequent commissions for?  If it is closely related to your niche, it is worth considering if you could make a similar product (not the same- again no copying!) Think about how you could improve upon the idea and package it with your own spin on it. 

Those are the six ways with the bonus tip to find the best digital product to sell to your audience.

Time to start doing some market research!

It’s important to use a combination of different research strategies to come up with some solid data on what your audience wants.

Asking your audience directly is the best way to find out exactly what they want. I highly recommend incorporating some of these other market research strategies as well. Then collect the data in some type of Google spreadsheet or doc and see what patterns emerge.  

Always go back to your audience if a few different ideas are sticking out to you from your data.

Do a poll to see which one they are most interested in.

Then validate the idea by allowing them to pre-order the product before you create it!

This is especially important if you are creating a larger-scale digital product that will take a significant amount of time to create.    

Yes, this is a process that takes some time, but I guarantee you that doing your research FIRST will save you so much time in the long run!

Not to mention give you clarity and confidence knowing that what you are creating is going to help your audience. Most importantly it’s exactly what your audience wants.  

I have created a Pre-Product Market Research Checklist for you covering each of these steps so that you can be confident that the digital products you create are what your audience actually wants!