How to Sell Digital Downloads Online (Complete Guide)

In today’s world, every single business is making its online presence, and if you want to make money, believe me, there are hundreds of ways to do it, and one of them is selling digital downloads.

In this article, we will guide you through the complete process of how you can earn money by selling digital products and the platforms that you can use for this purpose. Let’s dive into some basic details.

What is a Digital Product?

A digital product is any sort of intangible property that you may sell for a handsome amount of money. It can be sold separately or can be distributed without any need for inventory. Isn’t it amazing? You just have to produce your content and sell its digital copies once you find the right audience for it.

Digital product examples include DVDs, eBooks, online courses, templates, graphical designs, and videos.

Benefits of Selling Digital Downloads

Digital products are highly beneficial when sold online as compared to any physical product.

No Inventory needed: Digital products are highly convenient to sell. You do not need to own a shop or warehouse to store your products and items. You can get unlimited data storage at a very cheap price, any data storage provider.
High Profit: As you may already know, you can sell your product without any initial base charges once your first copy of the digital product is made. The profit margin is usually very high.
No Shipping Cost: It is one of the most prominent reasons for the decreasing demand for physical products. There are absolutely no shipping charges for digital products or downloads!

What Digital Products You Can Sell Online?

It is one of the most common questions that may come to your mind as soon as you find selling digital products attractive and profitable. To be honest, there is no limitation to what and how much you can sell digital products or downloads online.

There are hundreds of choices from which we have found the best ones that are currently trending online. You’ll have to determine by yourself which digital product is the best one for you to make money.

1. Selling Services through Digital Products

You must’ve heard about the gym trainers offering their weekly or monthly training plans online. These plans are nothing but a form of digital downloads. The people can purchase their services (videos) and can start following them on the go.

2. Selling Educational Material

There are thousands of websites out there that provide eBooks or educational training courses in different fields of study. Nobody wants to get stuck with books everywhere, and people find it really convenient to learn through eBooks.

Attending a lecture in a class might be boring, you can cash in that by offering a course in which you can teach whatever you are good at.

3. Selling Music as a Digital Product

If you’re a musician, then we would like to congratulate you as there is an immense chance of your success in making money using digital downloads. All you have to do is build a vast audience and fan following, which will ultimately lead them to buy your digital albums.

Being a music artist, you can sell ringtones, music albums, wallpapers, fan videos, and much more.

4. Selling Memberships as Digital Products

It is a complete online business. From the aspects of marketing to producing great service membership plans, you’ll have to be perfect from every viewpoint.

If you own some premium content of any service or niche, people will come to you and will buy it. The memberships can be of many types. For example, people like to read informative articles, and there are a few news websites that charge weekly or monthly payments from the readers in their subscription plans.

5. Selling Templates and Designs

This product has also got a massive scope if you’re a graphic designer or web designer. The web developers are earning huge profits by developing website themes for one time and are getting paid for every time a user buys their work.

If you’re a skilled graphic designer, there are no bounding limits that can stop you from getting succeeded in selling your talent online.

Where Can You Sell Digital Products or Downloads?

After the selection of the correct digital product to sell, the next decision to make is usually where to sell the digital product to maximize profit. Don’t worry; we’ve got you covered, and here are the top platforms where you can sell digital products or downloads.

FetchApp

FetchApp is a premium service selling platform that gives you a free plan (5MB max storage). You can attach multiple files here to your single digital product.

Single

Best suited for musicians, Single is hands down the only tool you need as a music artist to sell digital products online. It provides lots of useful features that you will surely love as a musician.

Digital Downloads

As the name implies, it is a free digital downloading platform by Shopify. It is commonly used by eCommerce businesses that trust Shopify for a long time.

Simple Goods

Simple Goods is so easy to use with its integrating feature to your website or blog of any CMS (WordPress, Tumblr, or Squarespace). You can even start selling your products without even having a website.

Digital Product Delivery (DPD)

It is a huge platform for selling downloadable content. Selling pdfs, videos or eBooks is very handy with the help of DPD. Although you will have to pay monthly service fees to them instead of per-sale fees. So it is an excellent platform as long as you are getting good sales.

Limitations to Selling Digital Products Online

With lots of pros, digital products do have a few cons. Let’s discuss them briefly.

High Competitiveness: By selling any sort of digital product, you are directly competing with the free services or products available on the internet. And it is tough to beat them unless your content is so much compelling that people are forced to buy it.
Piracy: Your content can easily be pirated and is susceptible to theft. You need to be cautious and should take necessary measures to protect your content from getting pirated. Once your content is pirated, it is hard to regain its value.