5 Digital Products You Can Sell On Your Blog

Creating and selling a digital product is a great way to monetize your blog. In other words, it’s a clever strategy to get paid for blogging, because anyone who visits your blog will have the option to buy something from you before they exit your website.

A digital product is something you can sell online such as a PDF download or an online course of some sort. The digital products you create to sell on your blog should always have significant value, such as specialized information that is not easy to find for free online (or if it is easy to find online, perhaps not as in-depth as your product.)

Typically, the buyer can access your product immediately after payment. An online course, for example, is a digital product that your blog visitor can access as soon as they pay for it online. You don’t need to ship a digital course, and the fact that it’s available immediately gives users more incentive to buy it now. Another digital product that’s a popular choice is an ebook that users can download after payment. Much more information, knowledge, and expertise will be included in an ebook compared to a blog article, and that’s why it’s worth paying for.

How Do You Get Paid For Blogging With Digital Products?

You might be wondering, can you really get paid for blogging through digital products? The answer is yes, especially if your readers trust you and view you as an expert in a given niche.

Think of it this way: You wrote the blog post for free, but the digital product you’re selling at the bottom of the blog post – the online course or ebook, for example – is not free, because it expands on the teaser content you provided for free.

You’ll make more money with digital products if you have word-of-mouth referrals and great reviews, which is why you should put care into your product before you launch it on your blog.

Do you have the time to create an online course to sell on your blog? What are you good at, that you could teach others how to be good at? What type of content do your readers seem to want more of? What subject matter are you an expert in? Is it the type of subject matter that is best explained through a video, or best explained in writing? Asking yourselves these questions will help you figure out which digital products you should create.

We’ll discuss 5 of the best digital products to sell on a blog in more detail, but first, why is this monetization strategy so profitable?

Why Are Digital Products So Profitable?

The best part about creating a digital product is that you only have to create it once, and you can then sell it thousands of times. When you think about the time and effort that goes into writing an ebook or creating an online course, don’t forget that you can sell that product an infinite number of times without having to put in any additional work (aside from the occasional marketing efforts).

This means that while you are in bed, fast asleep, people around the globe could be buying a digital product you created years ago. It’s passive income, and you don’t have to wake up in the morning and ship anything to the buyer – they already have it.

The fact that it’s a digital product that means you have endless inventory, and there’s no limit on how many copies you can sell. Aside from the initial effort required to create the product, it’s smooth sailing and passive income. The ease of distribution is especially appealing, and whether you’re selling your digital product for $5 or $595, the sales can really add up over time.

Think about how low the overhead costs are when creating a digital product, and how high the profit margins are. Imagine spending six weeks putting together an ebook, and earning six figures from its sales. All you have to do is be self-disciplined enough to create a quality product, and educate yourself on how to market it. Marketing it through your blog is a great start.

What Are The Best Digital Products To Sell On Your Blog?

When strategizing how to get paid for blogging, it’s important to remember that there are many different ways to monetize your blog, and you shouldn’t stick with just one revenue-generating method, because variety is key.

When you run multiple revenue-generating strategies at once, your blog will bring in multiple streams of income, and you’ll get to find out which of your plans produces the most return.

For example, if you run a dating advice blog and you find that your online breakup recovery course is generating the most income, you’ll know that creating more online courses should be part of your game plan going forward.

Your blog could sell multiple digital products, but you could simultaneously have other revenue-generating strategies in place. For example, your blog might have revenue coming in from Google AdSense ads, sponsored posts, affiliate links, and three different digital products. This is a great example of a blog that is generating multiple streams of income at once.

Below we’ll review 5 of the best digital products you could create and sell on your blog, and you may decide to create more than one of them. You never know what will sell and what won’t, so there’s no harm in experimenting with different digital products.

1. E-Book

You already know how to write blog posts, so you’ve got what it takes to write an ebook and sell it as a product on your blog.

It’s easier than you think to figure out what your ebook should be about. All you have to do is check your blog analytics to see which blog posts get the most traffic. Research which blog topics are most popular on other sites as well. It’s clear that the topics these popular posts are based on must be topics that readers are eager to learn more about. It would therefore be safer to spend the time writing an ebook on that popular topic, than a random topic not based on user data.

Ebooks generally range from $5 to $20, and if you’re looking to make money from your blog, know that the sales can really add up. Ebooks can be short or long, and the topic can be light or heavy. Imagine that your food blog’s most visited blog post is a post about keto smoothie ideas. At the end of that blog post, you could sell an ebook entitled, “101 Keto Smoothies That Will Make Your Mouth Water and Keep Your Stomach Full”. Your ebook expands on the topic, as it’s a collection of smoothie recipes that you took the time to compile. It makes sense that it’s an ebook, since it would be too long for a blog post.

Ebooks should not be about trending news. The topic you write on should be evergreen – something people always search for content on. This includes dating advice, health tips, self-improvement, self-help, business advice, and any other evergreen topic that is popularly searched. Choose a topic you have expert knowledge in.

You can hire a graphic designer to design your book cover and format your ebook into a clean-looking PDF, or teach yourself how to design an ebook using online resources.

On your blog, any blog posts relevant to your ebook’s subject matter should have a call-to-action for the reader to buy your ebook. Your call-to-action in your blog post can be as simple as, “I get a lot more in-depth on this topic in my ebook. Click here to buy my ebook and learn more about this.”

2. Online Course

In this day and age, online courses are never a bad idea to create, especially if you have a lot of expert knowledge to share in a specific category. E-learning (electronic learning) and self-education is the future. More and more youth are educating themselves with online courses and digital resources instead of other more traditional means of education.

E-learning has become so popular that the global e-learning market was estimated at $144 Billion in 2019, and is expected to reach over $374 Billion by 2026. The rise of the e-learning industry should encourage you to create a digital course to sell on your blog. There are many tools and platforms available online that will help you design a course, record it, and make it look professional.

3. PDF Checklist

A PDF download or checklist of some sort is typically a low-priced digital product that is targeted to a specific audience combined with direct-response copywriting. For example, a health and fitness blogger might sell an affordable $5 PDF checklist entitled “25 Exercises For An Hourglass Figure.”

This fitness guru’s blog would have a section of text with strategic direct-response copywriting to entice the reader to buy the $5 PDF product. Direct-response copywriting is written with the goal of compelling the reader to take immediate action. In this case, the action would be to click-and-order the PDF checklist of exercises they need to take with them to the gym. Why not spend $5 on a PDF download if it might help you with your workout plan? Many of your readers won’t think too hard about spending $5, especially if they trust your knowledge.

4. Stock Photos

Have you ever thought of selling your own stock photos? All blogs, websites and digital marketers need good visuals and great photos. Some people take their own photos, and some people buy photos. Those that buy photos are often sick and tired of Shutterstock, and are looking for better photos to buy.

Many of the bloggers who take their own photos have a natural talent for photography, and perhaps haven’t thought of the idea to sell their photos as a digital product.

If you have a talent for capturing the moment and a natural skill for photography, stock photos could be the perfect digital product for you to sell.

Every single day, a website owner, blogger or marketer is fed up with their current Shutterstock photo options because they’re too cheesy, outdated, they’re not niche enough, or are not on trend.

For you to sell stock photos as a digital product, all you need to invest in is a good camera and decent photo editing software.

Models will often volunteer to be in your stock photos because they need professional photos for their profiles. All you have to do is choose a niche for your photo collection, and take various photos within that niche to sell as a bundle. Alternatively, you could have a subscription-based stock photo website with various niche photo categories included in the subscription.

5. Digital Resource Kits

Everybody loves kits, and they’re very marketable. Here is an example of how selling a kit works:

Imagine you own a dating advice blog, and you moonlight as a relationship coach. Your readers love your advice and often turn to your blog when they need advice or are having trouble letting go of an ex.

You could sell a digital product called the “Breakup Recovery Kit” which includes:

• Your online course entitled, “How to do the Inner Work Required to Heal from a Breakup”.
• A PDF resource entitled, “Your Guide to Heart-Healing Meditation”.
• PDF checklists of daily affirmations for morning and night.
• A video compilation of people who found love again after heartbreak
• Your ebook on healing from heartbreak, and
• A one-on-one, hour long coaching session

This is the type of digital product that can be sold for a higher dollar amount (even hundreds of dollars) because of how many resources the buyer gets access to. If you have a good marketing plan in place to sell your kits to your blog readers, you could earn a six-figure income from your blog.

What if You Don’t Have Any Digital Products Yet, and You’re Not Sure Where to Start?

If you don’t yet have any digital products created, you don’t know how to create digital products, or you’re not sure which digital product you’d like to sell, what should you do in the interim?

If you want to make money on your blog and you don’t yet have digital products, look into getting sponsored posts for now.

It might take time to learn how to design an online course, but while you’re learning how to create digital products, you can still make money on your blog through sponsored content.

You can use Scalefluence to land sponsored post deals and get paid to blog. Scalefluence matches brands with bloggers for sponsored post arrangements. Sign up for Scalefluence today, and start getting paid to blog.