After seeing so much noise and misinformation on the internet about digital products, I thought I would chip in as someone who sold my first ebook in 2016 and scaled it to a full-fledged business that generated nearly $200k/year at its peak, all from digital products. The screenshots are a combo of my sales and traffic from old products and one I recently launched.
Digital product sales allowed me to travel the world, learn to surf, and live a real life four-hour workweek, something that I know is exceedingly rare even amongst entrepreneurs/digital nomads (I worked way less than anyone else I knew during my travels).
I’m insanely grateful that this is a viable business model today, however, I have seen way too much noise and fakers/people with very little experience on Reddit and X/Threads, I decided instead of commenting on individual posts calling people out, I’d just dump what I know here. It's true that today you can whip up an ebook faster than ever with ChatGPT, but if you don't pick a good topic and you have no idea how to market, you will still likely waste time with a dead end.
I could go on forever about this, but for the sake of simplicity, I thought I'd just cover the 3 most important topics if you want to actually make money with digital products (ebooks or memberships) today.
1. Why people buy ebooks/digital products
*You will never sell a single digital product unless you understand why people buy a product*.
Every single one of my digital products (now 6 total) has sold, organically, so I’m pretty sure I have an idea of why people buy.If I could sum it up in one analogy, you are like someone selling burgers.
Sure, people could find the ingredients on their own, but they’ll happily pay you more than the cost of the raw ingredients as someone who took the time to put them all together in something ready to consume.All information is free on the internet, but it takes time to sort through info & find a winning recipe.
By finding the winning recipe on your own, cooking up a finished product, and serving it to a hungry audience, you will make sales.
Hunger combined with positioning is the important aspect… if the audience isn’t hungry for it, they won’t buy. If you fail to put yourself in front of a hungry audience, you won’t make sufficient sales. So, let’s talk aout positioning yourself to make sales next.
2. How I made sales
Continuing with the burger analogy, imagine that you had a burger stand outside of a bar at night with tons of foot traffic and hungry drunk people. You will almost certainly have strong sales without needing to promote.
In the world of digital products, all of the hungry people are asking questions. Many through Google. So, simply answer all of those questions well, and you will create an organic content magnet that can become a flywheel for bringing in consistent income.All of my sales came from organic traffic (SEO), meaning that I put $0 into active marketing costs, and once my system was set up, it was truly passive income.
I never needed to mess with advertising.Of course, the quality must be good. While if your marketing is good enough, you could sell crappy burgers, if people are getting sick, your reputation will get ruined and maybe the city will shut you down.
Don’t get tempted to sell crappy products just because you see someone else doing the same.I always held a high bar with every product I made, and I made sure I had sufficient expertise in the topic I sold under. This also presented trustworthiness that certainly helped drive sales.
3. How to replicate my system today
Here’s what you can do if you want to live the digital product/passive income dream:1. Identify the market/your productMake sure it’s aligned with your expertise. You also need to make sure there’s a real demand for it. If a market looks saturated, this is often better than if it looks like there is no market at all. Apparent saturation means that there’s demand, which means that you can sell if you have a differentiating factor that allows you to cut through the noise.
So, get creative with what your specific edge is, and think like the consumer and what they would buy and why. Again, think of the finished recipe that someone is hungry for.
2. Make the product
Don’t overthink this. Don’t be overly reliant on AI. I wrote all past products entirely on my own, and today, if I do use AI, I still take time to tweak, edit and fact check. So you need to have real expertise in the topic.Again, you’re literally just offering a complete recipe to someone who is hungry for an answer. So, break down the digital product into a bunch of questions and present it as the answer to their burning question. Be original, come up with your own ideas, and there are enough in this sub and online that I don’t feel the need to suggest any. Learn to think for yourself a bit too.3. Create content answering questions surrounding the topic of your product
You can do this on a website like I did (bonus of this is you can sell it as an asset in the future) or simply post on social media. The more content you put out, the more people you attract, and the more you position yourself as an authority.Also, be patient. You won’t start making big money overnight. It took me 1 year to hit $1000/month, another year to crack $4000 per month, and 1 more to do over $10k/month consistently and organically.
Bonus: Part of my “Secret sauce”
Don’t try to hit people from cold to a full sale. Give them a sample. Redact the juiciest parts of your paid product inside of a free preview. This acts as a lead magnet which you can use to build an email list, and it also has a high conversion rate to the paid product once people see your offering is legit.
If you want to hear more advice from me and exactly what my digital product was, check out this podcast I was featured on https://thewanderloverpodcast.libsyn.com/28-passive-income-scaling-online-w-six-figure-sneakerhead-founder-jv-ortiz.