What are Digital Products and How Bloggers Make a Living with Them

Digital products are my main source of income in my blogging business. I believe that they are the best and most profitable way for you to monetize your blog as well.

In this blog post, I am answering the question: What are digital products? I will discuss why you want to choose digital products over physical products. I will also explain how to figure out what your ideal person needs and provide 5 types of small digital products that convert.

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

What are digital products?  

Digital products are simply products that you create and deliver digitally.

The customer typically receives the product via email or by logging into a specific platform. Then from there, they can immediately access and/or download the digital file. 

Depending on the format – whether it’s a text, audio, or video file – your customer is then able to read, listen to, view, or print out and use/display the product.

Why Digital Products: The Advantages  

There are several advantages to creating digital products over physical ones.

  

1. You create it once and you can sell it over and over again.  

No need to continue trading time for money to create physical products over and over again.  You can literally make money while you sleep!  It’s great when you wake up to a sale in the morning.  Or you come home from an outing with your family or friends to find that you have made a sale. 

It becomes a type of passive income for you and it’s very doable.

2. There’s no inventory

You don’t need space to store your supplies or finished products!

3. There’s no packing or shipping costs involved.  

This saves you a ton of time and money! 

With digital products your customer typically receives their product immediately after ordering. You can easily automate this within your platform or email provider, so you are not involved at all. 

Once you create it and set it up, it becomes passive income.

4. There is a very low cost to create and deliver digital products.  

You will likely only need an online design and publishing tool and possibly the software to deliver it depending on how you choose to do the transaction.

I create all my small digital products in PowerPoint and Canva – Canva offers a very generous free plan that gives you most of what you will need. 

I personally use the pro plan which is $9.99/month or $119 for an entire year, to get access to premium stock photos, the ability to upload my own brand’s fonts to use, and especially for the photo background remover.

For my digital courses, I use Teachable.

5. A higher profit

Since the cost to create and deliver a digital product is so low, you get to keep pretty much all of the profit, minus any transactional fees.

I learned this the hard way after I created my first physical product for my blog in the parenting niche back in 2017.

I created a physical journal for kids with anxiety and put it up on Amazon for $6.99.

Most days of the month, I still make sales on this book, but the profit I make for each book sold after the Amazon printing and distribution costs is between $1-$2 a book.

A few months after originally creating this print version, I decided to offer a digital version of my journal on my website. I added a few extra printables and priced it at $6.00. I set it up so that a customer can instantly download their digital product after purchasing.

The only thing that I am charged for is a Stripe or PayPal processing fee. So when someone purchases this I make a little more than $5 profit per sale with this digital product. 

Can you see the difference!?!

What type of Digital Products Should I Create?

Okay now that you know the answer to ‘What are digital products?” and you know some of the advantages of digital products you might be thinking okay, great I love this idea, but what type of digital product should I create?

Ifyou are asking this, the good or maybe bad news depending on how you look at it is it’s really not your decision to make! 

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 with? 

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 that your audience does want. 

Please learn from my mistake. 

Back in 2017, I had heard people say this to me, but I was confident that I knew what my audience wanted and so I jumped right in without validating the idea.  I poured weeks of my time into a course and when it launched- No one bought it!

It was the completely wrong way to go about it!

I had to start from square one and get really clear on what my audience wanted. First, I did a beta launch and had everyone pay before I created the entire thing. This is a must and is something I teach all my coaching clients how to do now, so they don’t waste time or money.

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Schedule a free 15-minute clarity call via Zoom to discuss where you are in your blogging business and what your next steps should be.

5 small digital products to sell on your blog that actually convert

Alright now that you have some more clarity on digital products, let’s discuss some small digital product ideas.

Let me start off by saying that yes, digital courses are great.  They are a huge part of my business strategy, but they take a significant amount of time to create.  So today I want to give you 5 small high-converting digital product ideas that you could choose from to get started.

Tip: Small digital products can lead to higher-priced products as you grow and scale your business

1. Workbooks

Workbooks are a great way to help your audience gather information on a topic, brainstorm their ideas, thoughts, and questions, and help them get to the next step. 

I created a digital workbook for my audience in the parenting space (You can learn more about this in the video above at time stamp- 7:51.)

2. Ebooks

Ebooks are a great and simple way to share your knowledge in a nice package. 

They are primarily written text with images and graphics to help illustrate your points.

There are some amazing design templates that you can use that allow you to just paste in your text and images without worrying about the layout.  If you have a lot of blog posts written you can take these, elaborate on them a bit more, add some graphics, and boom you have an ebook!  

Even though people can access all of your blog posts for free, if you are adding in some extra information and packaging it up in one nice convenient package, people will buy it. 

Time is money and people will pay for the convenience of having all the information in one digital book over having to search it all out on your blog.  

3. Spreadsheets/Trackers

Spreadsheets and trackers are a great way to organize information and can be a huge time saver. You can offer spreadsheets and trackers that are already filled in for you based on your niche.

Or blank ones that have built-in calculators or prompts like a monthly budgeting spreadsheet, inventory spreadsheet, weight loss tracker, or a water intake tracker.

4. Printable Packs

A printable pack consists of a few related printables bundled together that your readers can print out and get a quick win from. 

You might create ONE free printable as an opt-in on your site to grow your email list. If that is a success, you can create a few extra printables related to that freebie, package it up and sell it as a printable pack to your audience. 

If you blog about kids’ activities you could create a road trip printable pack for kids with different games, puzzles, coloring pages, etc.

You could also do printable family game packs for holidays. You could create a homeschooling printable lesson pack if you are in the homeschooling niche. My parenting blog helps parents raising kids with big emotions and sensory challenges and so I created a Feelings and Emotions Printable Pack based on the journal I told you about earlier.

5. Planners

Let’s face it, most of our lives are crazy busy, right? We often struggle to keep track of things and manage our day-to-day activities.

I know as a busy mom of two boys, I live by my to-do lists and planners.   They help me stay organized and they can help your audience as well.

There are planners you could create for every niche.  Think of an idea that would fit your niche, i.e. a weekly meal planner, healthy living and fitness planner, travel planner, beauty planner, workout planner, gardening planner, chore planner, and so on.

Are you ready to start?

You now know what digital products are and how bloggers monetize their blogs with them. I hope that this blog post has got you thinking about the possibilities

You can absolutely do this!

Have more questions or comments about this post? Share them in the comments below.