Are you wondering how to make money with a website without selling physical products or services? Maybe you don’t want the hassle of having inventory and have heard about Google killing ad focused and affiliate websites, so you’re wondering “How to sell digital downloads on my website?”
The good news is that selling digital downloads has never been easier. So let’s jump right in and take a closer look.
How To Sell Digital Downloads On My Website
Today, selling digital downloads has never been easier. There are so many software solutions to help you and people are generally trusting of making purchases online.
Supposing you have a website already, to sell digital downloads on your website, you can follow a simple series of steps starting with choosing the type of download you want to sell.
- Choose The Type Of Digital Download You Want To Sell: Firstly, you need to consider what type of digital downloads you want to sell. Digital downloads come in many different forms such as ebooks, guides, online courses, software applications, music, and even visual art downloads. Conduct a basic survey of your visitors – or, even better, your email list subscribers – to see what they are having problems within your niche and how they best learn. This will give you great insight for planning your offer.
- Choose A Platform: Even if you have an existing website, to sell digital downloads, you need a platform that can handle transactions and digital delivery. There are several options available including e-commerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce that offer all-in-one solutions for selling digital products. And there are specialized platforms like Gumroad that focus specifically on digital downloads.
- Install An E-commerce Plugin: Platforms like Shopify offer built-in e-commerce tools for selling digital products. However, if you already have a website or you’re using a platform like WordPress, you will need to install an e-commerce plugin. There’s a wide range of e-commerce plug-ins out there with varying functionality, including payment processing and digital content delivery. Again, it’s good to do some research to find the right fit for your website.
- Set Up A Payment Gateway: To sell digital downloads on your website you will need to accept online payments. So the next step is to add and configure a payment gateway to process your transactions. Popular options include PayPal, Stripe, and Square. Whichever payment gateway you choose, you need to ensure that it is 100% secure and reliable. However, we do not recommend PayPal due to their unfriendly customer treatment (they nearly bankrupted an earlier business of ours) but we can recommend Stripe, which has been a good merchant account provider.
- Add Your Digital Downloads: After you have completed the above steps you can now add and create product pages for each digital download you want to sell. Make sure you add your product details and include a description, the price and any other relevant information. In addition, now’s the time to upload the product file and configure the delivery method. You can choose your delivery method which can either be integrated with your chosen payment gateway for automatic download, or another way is to send a download link to your clients’ email.
- Marketing: Think you can sit back and watch the cash come rolling in? Then think again. Marketing in this context simply refers to getting eyeballs on your offer. If you already have an audience, then filter those who self select as interested (through various page visits, relevant email options, etc) to your offer. If you don’t have an audience, you can partner with other websites by offering affiliate commissions… but this is typically a hard sell for unproven products. We always recommend building a niche audience first, and then figuring out what they want to buy.
These steps form the outline of what you need to do to offer digital downloads for sale on your site. Each step has its own separate rabbit hole that you really should go down to build competence in order to be successful.
And, if you are unsuccessful – don’t sweat it. You can tweak your offer until you find one that converts, and then scale traffic to that offer when you start getting sales. If you can’t make anything work related to your digital download, try something else. Don’t get discouraged. Remember that most very successful serial entrepreneurs have had way more failures than successes. If you’re destined to fail, then fail cheap & fast so you can pivot to find something else that works.
