Most of us have gotten so comfortable with the internet that we forget how new it all is. But take a look back and you’ll see that it wasn’t until 1999 that the internet actually took off as an avenue for business. Since then, ecommerce has grown by leaps and bounds. As internet marketing has developed, it’s opened the doors for many people to get involved in a brand new form of business—making and marketing digital products.
What is a digital product? It’s anything that can be made into a digital format. It could be a book that’s formatted as a PDF file. It might be a lecture that’s recorded and formatted as an MP3, a type of audio file. A digital product might be an original drawing or work of art that’s scanned and formatted as a jpeg.
Anything that can be transformed into a digital format is a digital product.
Digital products are usually sold as digital downloads, but they can also be burned to a disc as delivered as a CD or DVD.
The cost of starting up a business that makes and markets digital products can be quite low, especially when compared to the cost of going into business creating and selling hard goods.
Because of this low cost of entry, many people who might not otherwise be able to fund their own business start-up is able to get a foothold in the world on online marketing by doing a digital product launch. In fact, one of the most popular topics on the internet are the stories of people who started on a shoestring, created their own digital products and used savvy internet marketing to make a mint.
Creating and marketing your own digital product can lead to great financial success. But whether or not it will lead to financial success for you depends on the skills and experience you bring to the game.
If you already have an idea for a book, a lecture, a workshop or even a musical album that you’d like to market online, you’re way ahead of the game.
But almost anyone involved in digital product creation and marketing will tell you that making your product is the easy step. It gets harder as you wade into marketing.
Marketing is a process that’s often described as being made up of four parts—product, placement, pricing and publicity. Giving any one of these parts less than your full attention can cut your chances to success.
Even people who’ve never had prior experience with marketing can work their way through product, placement and publicity. Product is the part where you decide what you’ll be making and selling. That could be an ebook, an audio, a video or even artwork.
Placement is the part where you decide where you’ll be selling. Sure, you want to sell on the internet, but where, exactly? It could be from your own web site. Or it could be from a digital product library like Clickbank.
Publicity is the part where you decide how you’ll draw attention to your product and get people to notice it. You might market through forums or use pay per click advertising or any number of other methods.
Pricing is the last P in the marketing mix—and this is where so many people go astray.
Knowing how to price digital products for profit is very important. Price too high and you won’t make many sales. Price too low and you’ll lose out on profits. Lose out on enough profits and you won’t be in business very long.
Getting your price right makes the difference between a successful product launch, one that starts you on the road to a viable business, and a product flop that eats up your time and money until it runs out of steam.
Knowing how to price digital products is one of the key skills of a successful online business owner. Yet too many people leave this important task to guesswork. They’ll say, “I guess people would pay this much for my ebook.” Or they’ll ask their friends to guess, “What would you pay if you were buying my ebook/”
Guessing about the price you’ll put on your digital product is a sure way of making a costly mistake, one that could potentially put you out of business.
You can avoid that danger by learning how successful people go about setting their prices. By investing a small amount of time and money in learning how to price your digital products, you’ll greatly increase your chances of building sales, building profits, building long-term success.
