There are few things more appealing for sellers than the prospect of limitless, relatively low-maintenance inventory. Fortunately, you can make this dream a reality through the art of digital products.
Don’t know where to start? No worries! Below, we’ll show you how to design and start selling your own digital products from scratch.
What Are Digital Products?
While they might not be tangible, digital products bring us plenty of value in our day-to-day lives. More often than not, a digital product is a piece of art, media, or education that brings value to an audience. Some common digital products include:
- Digital journals or planners
- E-books
- Photo prints
- Audio or music
- Lighting filters or presets
These digital products can be sold anywhere on the internet with the help of Kojis– free, customizable storefronts built for selling on social media (or elsewhere)!
What Is A Koji?
A Koji is a type of interactive media that can help you sell your products, downloads, services or premium content. To create a Koji, simply select a template and customize before sharing the unique URL on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, WhatsApp, or anywhere else!
How To Create A Digital Product In 5 Steps
Ready to get started? Here’s how to create and start selling digital products for your brand from scratch.
1. Determine Your Audience
To start, it’s essential that you’ve put in the work of cultivating an audience that’s specific to you and your brand. Without a content niche and a community around it, efforts to build a sustainable business are futile.
Don’t get us wrong– this doesn’t mean that you need to have a large audience (though that can certainly help). When it comes to making consistent sales, quality over quantity generally wins out. A seller with just 1,000 followers can make a living if they have cultivated a dedicated following and provide obviously valuable assets.
Make sure you have a good idea of where you want to go as a seller before you brainstorm products. This doesn’t mean that there’s no room to pivot if your first niche of choice doesn’t work for whatever reason– whether you’re transitioning from lifestyle to fitness content or photography to music, it’s never too late to experiment in another content space.
In fact, the best creators understand that adjusting your content over time is a necessary part of maintaining an engaged customer base. Bottom line; find a specific area you can provide value in, but don’t be afraid to change over time as needed.
2. Brainstorm Product Ideas
Once you’ve cultivated an audience, it’s time to brainstorm product ideas! At this point, your audience might’ve already provided you with some suggestions. Maybe your followers are begging for your secret cookie recipe. Perhaps your top fans want an unreleased demo version of your top song. Pay attention to these pleas and develop products around them if they resonate with you as a seller.
No one can tell you what to sell, but here are a couple of product idea examples by niche to spark some inspiration:
- Lifestyle: Sell custom shoutouts to your top fans or user-generated content for brands.
- Cooking: Sell online cookbooks or one-off recipes.
- Music: Sell sample packs or special versions of songs.
- Photo or Video: Sell exclusive images and videos, along with lighting or filters.
- Beauty or Style: Monetize your sense of style with affiliate links to your favorite pieces and fashion tips.
- Travel: Build your own travel guides or e-book with tips for surviving life on the road.
- Fitness: Consider creating a workout plan, fitness tracker, or video exercise course.
3. Create Your Product and Koji
Deciding what product to create is the challenging part. Now that you have direction, put it into practice! Don’t forget to document the process of creating your digital product– this might make great promotional material once you’ve made it to the selling stage.
While building your first product can be intimidating, there are plenty of free resources available to help guide you through the process.
Check out one of our Koji creators, Sandra Di walk you through building your own custom printables for customers:
Once you’ve built your product, use a corresponding Koji template to create your free storefront. There’s a wide range of Kojis for digital products like Sell Digital Products, Sell E-Books, Sell A Service, and Sell Video Courses to name a few.
4. Get Feedback
Now that you’ve created your Koji, you’re ready to start selling! Ask your friends and fans for feedback on your product and adjust as needed. It’s a good idea to test out different content messaging, too.
Experiment with different types of content and call-to-action messaging to see what media is leading to more conversions. You can test out as many products or iterations as you’d like on Koji, so don’t be afraid to go back to the drawing board if one product isn’t yielding results.
5. Share To Sell
There’s a common misconception that once you create a valuable product, it will essentially sell itself. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth– the real work starts after you’ve put a product on the market. Without content that showcases the value of your product(s), making a sale is an uphill battle.
Start creating content that incorporates your products, linking out to your product Kojis. Your customers will be able to purchase your product on any platform. If you’re not linking out directly, make sure to direct your customers to where they can purchase your product. For instance, creator @Tshirtfit makes a point to direct to his cookbook Koji at the end of every video:
@tastyshredz Broke but yoked. If you’ve made this one before make it again. Out here broke before christmas. Comes out to like $1.50 a sandwich. #breakfast #eggmcmuffin #easyrecipe #budgetmeals #budgetmealplanning #highproteinmeals #lowcalorie ♬ Chill Day – LAKEY INSPIRED
The more you successfully share while providing value to your audience, the more you sell.
Selling digital products is a great way to build a sustainable business as an online creator. Have fun designing and delivering valuable digital assets for your fanbase!