About 6 years ago, I was a college dropout trying to sell products online and seeing if I could get anything to stick with only a few dollars to my name. But the first summer that I truly locked in with this, I was able to turn around $500 into about $300 per day. Then with just a few mistakes, my income went all the way back down to basically zero. Luckily though, fast forward to now, I was able to create a much more consistent income by selling digital products online.
I’ve been able to make multiple seven figures in income from my digital product businesses over the past couple years. The six secrets below could get you to that point a lot faster without making the same expensive mistakes. So this is going to be six lessons from 6 years of selling digital products online. Secret number six is probably the single most important lesson about starting and scaling a digital product business.
Secret 1: Have Inventory on Hand
Secret number one is to have inventory on hand. When you first start your digital product business, there’s this concept in your mind that every product you list for sale and every product you make has to be perfect before you can sell it. I used to think the exact same thing when I got started. So, I would sit down at my desk for hours and I would try and figure out the best niche to target and how to make the absolute perfect product.
And ultimately, I got stuck in this cycle of never actually getting any products posted for sale. I actually ended up spending more time worrying about what to make than I did actually making and posting products for sale. It’s almost so obvious that people still end up missing it. But the only time you make money is when people buy your product and they can’t buy from you if you don’t have something available to buy.
Inventory Over Perfection
If you walk into a store and they have like three items available for sale, the chances that you actually buy something are extremely low. Having inventory is more important than having perfect product listings. I’ve sold map prints and PNG files. I’ve sold real estate guides and courses and software tools. I’ve sold them on Etsy. I’ve sold on Shopify on my own websites.
And ultimately, the only thing that matters is having something available for sale. It’s so basic, but nobody can buy from you if you don’t have products for sale. And the second layer to that is that people can only buy something from you when you have products for them. Having anything for sale will make you more money than not posting anything at all. And the way that you scale up a digital product business quickly is by having targeted listings posted for sale.
This is based on the niche that you choose to sell in, which we’re going to talk about more in secret number four. It’s really easy to get caught up in not knowing what to make and being afraid that you’re going to be wasting your time and that your products aren’t going to sell, but you just have to have something posted for sale. It’s hard because what if it all ends up being a massive waste of time?
What if your products don’t sell? There’s all kinds of things that you have to learn. But just focusing on building up a catalog of products and having products for sale, is going to make you more sales over time.
Secret 2: Momentum Based Business Plan
Secret number two when you’re growing a digital product business is to focus on having a momentum-based business plan. There are always doubts and fears and obstacles that feel impossible to overcome. And the only way to get through it is by building up momentum. Momentum is built from doing literally any amount of work that gets you closer to your goal, no matter how small it is. And you can break it up into two stages.
Stage 1: For the Complete Beginner
If you’re a complete beginner and you haven’t even gotten started, you have to turn off the YouTube videos. You have to go open up your shop. You have to actually make your first product and you have to list it for sale. Every one of these very basic steps gets you a little bit closer and it starts building up that momentum.
Stage 2: Scaling Your Progress
Stage two is if you’re already making some progress. Maybe you have some products listed for sale, or maybe you’ve even made a few sales here and there, but it means following a business plan, which sounds really complicated, and that’s why most beginners don’t have one. The thing about a momentum-based business plan is it outlines what you’re going to do to ensure that the business grows.
Remember, you can’t control what people buy from you, but you can control what you have available to buy. Your business plan can be very simple, and it can literally just outline the steps that you’re going to take to grow the business. For example, you’re going to open up the shop and pick a niche. You’re going to make the first product and get it listed for sale.
Consistency Over Complexity
And then every single week, you’re going to spend 1 hour on market research, 3 hours of product creation, and ensure that you list a minimum of two products for sale. And then you’re going to repeat this every single week. You don’t have to over complicate it. And even a plan as simple as this would drive results over time.
A pro tip is that the more time you invest each week, the more results you’ll see and the sooner you’ll see them. It sounds almost backwards at first, but the quickest way to scale your income is to completely ignore your income goals and focus on only the things that are under your control. Don’t over complicate it and just take it one step at a time.
Secret 3: Manage Your Risk-to-Reward
Secret number three is to manage your risk-to-reward. If you’ve ever invested in the stock market or in crypto, you’ll know that it can be challenging. Even though you kind of know it’s going to make you money in the long term, you still have to do a few hours of research. Then you have to feel like you’re losing money when you put it into the market.
Then you have to sit there for months or for years and wait for it to pay off. Managing risk means you’re trying to save as much time and money as possible. And when you’re starting a business, it’s the same thing because when you start, you’re risking time or money or both. But there’s a few daily things that you can do to lower your overall time and financial commitment, which generally lowers your risk, even though a digital product business is one of the lowest risk businesses you can run.
Leveraging AI and Niche Specialization
The first is obviously to leverage AI. It can help you come up with ideas. It can help you create assets for your products and it’s definitely not going anywhere. So learning how to write great prompts is going to be a super useful skill and it’s like having a free assistant.
Second is to stick to just one niche. This makes it so that when you go to create your products, you don’t have to start over from complete scratch every single time. And each time you do make new products for that niche, every new product you make gets a little bit better over time.
Starting on Etsy for Organic Traffic
You can also lower your upfront financial risk by starting your digital product business on Etsy. If you want to sell your digital products on Shopify or on your own website, there’s essentially no way of getting customers to see your products without either making social media content or running paid ads. To be clear, you’re not guaranteed free customers on Etsy either.
But since Etsy does get millions of monthly shoppers on their site, you at least have the chance of getting some free traffic and organic sales on your products. You can also still always run paid ads to your products that are on Etsy if you want that extra traffic, but being able to list your digital products for sale for just 20 cents each and then having that chance of getting some free organic sales on those products can save you a lot of headache.
Over a million dollars in sales on Etsy came from completely free organic traffic without paying for any ads. And while paid ads are like fuel to a fire, if your products can’t sell at all organically, running paid ads might not work for those products either. That’s why the lower risk free traffic option on Etsy is recommended, at least at first.
Secret 4: Product Research
It actually takes the most amount of time to go and make the product. So, ensuring that the products you make are going to sell beforehand is the absolute best way to minimize your risk. And you can do that by doing great market research. Imagine you’re buying a birthday gift for one of your friends and instead of asking them what they like or even asking a mutual friend what you should get them, you just guess and assume they’re into fitness and you buy them a $200 pair of running shoes.
You’re super excited because you spent a couple hours at the store trying to find the best color and then you spent a lot of money on them. But then when you give it to them and they open up the gift, you can tell from their face that they hate running.
Weeks go by, they’re never going to touch the shoes again and you’ve spent your time, your money, and effort on something they never even wanted. That’s what building a product without market research is like. Market research is done by simply looking at what’s already working. There are a bunch of free ways or paid ways to do this. A tool like Listing View analyzes all of the listings on Etsy. It’s a huge database of products that lets you search for something you’re selling.
Analyzing Market Trends and Keywords
For example, if selling planners, you can search for that keyword, and it’s going to look through all of the listings that have the keyword planner in it. A bunch of results come up, and then you can sort and filter them by all-time bestselling or monthly bestselling, or basically filter them by any metric. This is by far the fastest way to get a huge list of the best products in the niche that you’re trying to sell in.
Then, clicking on a specific listing will analyze that listing and give a more detailed breakdown of all of the stats. This helps learn a few things about the niche and products you’re thinking of making. First, it helps determine if the products in that niche are actively and currently selling.
In this case, they are. And then it also tells what type of keywords could be used to get sales in that niche. Since you can see specific products that are doing well, you can tell exactly how to build your own products to target this niche.
The Listing View plugin shows real-time sales data on listings right inside of Etsy itself, so you don’t even have to go use the tool separately. This is a situation where if you spend a little bit of money, it can buy back a bunch of time. But for Listing View, you can get started completely for free.
Secret 5: Make Evergreen Products
Secret number five is to always make evergreen products. Would you rather have $1,000 today or get paid $100 per month passively? Some people would choose the $1,000 today, but the $100 per month passively makes way more sense long-term. Even if it was $100,000 today or $10,000 a month passively, the evergreen recurring income is always the better choice, even if it makes a little bit less today.
There’s always going to be trends in the market where you can cash in and make a little bit of money today, like a product that catches people’s interest this month but might not be relevant tomorrow or next month. The way to build consistent income is by creating evergreen products.
The Power of Consistent Long-Term Income
This really builds on top of all the other secrets shared so far. Products made and posted 5 years ago that continue to sell to this day — even if one of them conservatively only makes $1 per day and took three hours to make five years ago, that means over time you got paid $68 per hour that it took to make that digital product.
It doesn’t feel like you’re getting paid hundreds of dollars per hour, especially when you first start out. But over time, making evergreen quality products absolutely pays off. And that was conservative because it doesn’t count the products that make 10, 20, or $50 per day consistently. When you have a catalog of 50 of these products, that’s what makes it an absolute dream business.
Focus on quality evergreen products instead of trending products and quick cash. And also try and have an evergreen approach to the business in general. Instead of focusing on how you can get rich this month, plan for a couple months out or even next year if you can. Don’t give up the first day or the first week that it feels hard.
Consistent income comes with an evergreen approach to products and the business in general. You don’t want to invest all your time into creating products that don’t sell or don’t create a sustainable business.
Secret 6: Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
Secret number six is to only do what already works. Less than 1% of the world’s population can complete a marathon. And yet, every year, millions of people do it. And it’s still very possible. If you have the goal of running a marathon, but you show up on race day without any prior training, it’s going to be very difficult to run the entire thing.
But that doesn’t mean that running doesn’t work. Instead of trying to do it on your own, you can follow the proven training and diets and systems that have worked for millions of runners that come before you.
Following the Success of the Top 10%
You actually have higher odds of running a successful digital product business than you do of running a marathon. Roughly 34% of businesses make it over a 10-year time span. That means you’re 35% more likely to have a successful small business than to be able to run a marathon.
But regardless, the point remains because the fastest way to achieve your goal is to copy what top performers have already done. And this isn’t about copying their products — it’s about copying what it is that they do. If 90% of people quit and fail, the answer is to copy what the 10% does instead.
The Proven Path to Growth
If you truly wanted to run a marathon, you could easily figure out what type of training to do, what diet to be on, what type of shoes to wear. If you truly do want to run a successful digital product business, you have to figure out what causes people to fail and then do the opposite.
Successful people always have something for sale and they keep making and posting new products all the time. They focus on what they need to do to grow the business. They don’t focus on the money. They manage their risk to reward and they make products that aren’t going to die tomorrow and they focus on one strategy at a time. It’s very simple and rewarding just like running a marathon.
Reaching Your Goal and Big Announcement
It takes a lot of time and effort to reach your goal. And while working towards that goal, it might feel like you’re getting nowhere and you’re making no progress until it all pays off at once and you look like an overnight success.
Why Support Speeds Up Success
There is a private community available — not just a course where you get to learn how to run a digital product business, but a place where you get to ask questions and get feedback from people who are actively running and growing digital businesses. There are also calls where Q&A sessions and lessons are hosted.
There’s support from other sellers and just a community of like-minded people who are all trying to grow together. For those interested in getting a little bit more support instead of just being out there on your own, it’s worth checking out. It is a paid community, as the goal is to have only people who are actually serious. Read More
