Transcription
In this video, I'm going to show you everything you need to know before you start to sell digital products online. And by the end of the video, you'll have a comprehensive understanding of what digital products are, where to sell them, and what not to do when you're starting out. Because a lot of people make very common mistakes that are easily avoided. So make sure to watch this video if you are on the journey of starting a digital product shop online.
But before we get started, I want to quickly explain who I am. I'm Brandon Timothy. I'm an Etsy coach and seller; been doing it for almost a decade now. But that wasn't always the path for me. Before I did that, I was an electrician. I had a 9-to-5 job, a regular job, but I did not like that path. So I pursued different online ventures, doing side hustles, and that led me to selling digital products on Etsy, which ultimately gave me the success and freedom that I wanted. And now I'm back from traveling—I went traveling for over 13 different countries, backpacking for multiple years—and I'm here. I want to create content sharing what I know. So if you want to learn more, definitely subscribe to the channel. Also, I have a free Master Class you can check out in the link below, sharing my exact strategy on how I'm able to repeatedly create multiple successful digital product shops. So if you want an in-depth guide in details, obviously watch this video, but in there you'll have a way better understanding as well, and my step-by-step process on how I've been able to create all my shops, my digital shops. So check it out, link below for the free master class. But now let's begin the video.
So let's start with what are digital products and what are the main benefits? When we're talking about digital products, it's a very broad and very vast topic, and there's many different categories if you're talking about in the online realm. So, on a high level, what is it exactly? Digital products are essentially intangible items. Whereas physical products, you can touch it, you can feel it; digital products are actually just in a different format. Think of it as a virtual good where people can purchase, download it, and use it. And just to give you a simple example, let's say you don't like reading books; you like to read them on your iPad or your Kindle. You would buy ebooks, right? You don't get a physical book to read; you'll get a file where you can download it, you can install it into your application, and then read it. But it is all a digital format. So that is an example of a digital product. Another one that might be more relatable to us as sellers online for digital products: let's say you are selling resume templates. You would create your template on Microsoft Word; you would create the layouts, the formatting, and once that is built, you would put it online. You will let someone else buy that from you; they would download it, they would replace the names, replace their job roles, the descriptions to their own specific, unique needs, and they would use it. But that is you selling a digital product to them, and that itself is a digital product.
So just a couple benefits of selling digital products: Number one is no physical inventory. Unlike physical products, you have to house all your products, right? Whether you have big or small items, you still have a place to put them in. And digital products, there's none of that. You can do everything on a computer; everything is housed on the cloud or on the online platform. You just sell them as much as you want. Number two is overhead cost. You don't have to think about the manufacturing cost, the shipping, all those different things that add up when you're selling physical products. And digital, you don't have to worry about that as well. And this often translates to having higher margins when you have less overhead cost. Number three is global reach. Whenever you create a product, you can literally sell it to anyone around the world, whereas physical products, you can't do that well—you can, but it's a lot harder. Number four is scalability. Once you have the ability to sell one to a customer, you can easily scale that by repeating that same process or running ads, and the opportunity is way easier to scale that way. I remember the first sale that I got; it was only $7.99, but it was the happiest moment of my life because I realized if I'm able to make that one sale passively, I can sell that to 100 people, I can sell to a thousand people, and continue to scale. And that is what truly got me excited about selling digital products. Number five is flexibility, and this is my favorite one, because all you need is just decent internet and a laptop, and you can run any of your digital product shops with just the internet and the laptop. And that's the best part of it. I remember one of the shops that I opened up was on the Bali beachfront, hanging out there and able to build everything just on my computer, sitting by the beach, and that was the best. Also, if you're liking this video so far, make sure to subscribe to my channel. I try to create videos weekly, and if you're trying to start a digital product shop, definitely this is the place to be because I'm all about digital products, so I'll be sharing everything that you need to know. So subscribe if you want to learn more.
Now let's talk about the platform: Where should you be selling the digital products? We understand that selling digital products is amazing; how do we get started? Where should we be selling it? There's so many different platforms out there; what is the best one for your specific needs? There's a lot of different platforms that people are talking about, like Gumroad or Shopify, but for me, I found the most success for people who are beginners and even experts is just selling on Etsy. And it may seem like a place that is very saturated; why should we be doing it on Etsy? What are the main benefits compared to other platforms? And for me, the best one is because of the existing database, existing audience that Etsy provides. Now they have tens of millions of active shoppers all the time, looking for specific products that they will want. Whereas if you are selling it on other platforms, you will need to drive your own traffic; you can't leverage the audience that Etsy provides. So that's the main benefit: if you're someone who doesn't have an existing audience and you want to just get going, get sales the easiest way possible, just leveraging SEO—I'm getting ahead of myself—but that is the best way is using SEO for that.
So let's talk about why I love selling on Etsy. The first one, like I mentioned, is the existing customer base. They have a huge audience that's searching for exactly what they want, and they're using very specific, targeted keywords. So if you're able to understand that audience, doing some researching—which I'll talk about later on in this video—you understand how you should market it, you understand what keywords to put, what items to create that can drive the most traffic, leveraging the demand ultimately will give you the best chance of success. And Etsy also has really good dashboards and analytic tools for you to track your business, figuring out where your bottlenecks are, which parts are doing good, how is your conversion rate, and to make it really easy for you to digest that information so you can continue to improve your shop. So it's a very easy platform to use and super easy to set up as well. And like I mentioned, the last thing why I love about Etsy is you don't need to have an audience to get started. Every single shop that I own, I don't leverage my audience to build my shops; I just create my shops using my four-phase method, which I explained in my free Master Class. So check it out in the description if you want to, but that's all I do; I don't leverage anything or my audience to achieve that.
Now let's shift the topic and talk about digital products. Now we know the benefits of it; we know that Etsy is an amazing platform to sell on; we have to start thinking about the digital product itself. We have to do some researching on what are the products that are good for your skill sets, something that you can create on, something that also has good enough demand and low saturation. So there's a lot of different videos talking about what are the best products to look for, so I highly recommend watching some of those to know what are some product ideas for you. For example, you can be selling social media templates; there are financial templates; if you like to use Excel, you can do resume templates, like I mentioned earlier; some other ones are order intake forms or even wedding templates, right? There's so many different categories that you can explore. So a lot of people do amazing videos on those, so definitely check those out. But the key principles on how you execute that plan remains the same. If you are selling it on Etsy, the step-by-step process is still the same, regardless of what you're trying to sell. I do have a 50+ ideas guide that gives you a good starting point on what are the possibilities, so I also have that in the link below if you want to check it out for free.
Now some of the biggest mistakes that sellers make is they just jump on the bandwagon. Though, let's say you look through the list and you try to find the most popular items; you still have to do some additional research. You can't just jump right in; you have to look through the stats, whether you're using Erank, which is a tool that I recommend using to analyze the different supply and demand; you do need to do those initial researching and find those niche categories within that broad product category that makes sense. But I have a lot of other videos explaining how you can get more niche to really define your audience, your products, your branding, and everything like that. So make sure not to just jump right in and go for a really saturated category; you have to put your own spin on it, see how you can do things differently, create a unique selling proposition, and how you can find an edge in that market. So this is a good segue into the next part, which is market research.
Let's say you have a bunch of different product ideas that you're thinking about starting, but now still want to do some additional research. The last thing you want to do is spending weeks on weeks building up all your products, see launching a shop, and realize that wasn't a good category to begin with; you did not do the proper researching; you did not look at your competitors; you did not read the reviews. There's a lot of different things you need to do prior than just jumping ahead and start seeing what works. That is something that I did in the past; I did that for many times, and I just thought, you know what, I'll just keep pushing things out, I'll keep releasing items, see what sticks, and then go back to the drawing board and continue, continue the process. That can work sometimes, but for me, I take a way more strategic approach now. I like to do all my researching, everything beforehand, before I even start taking actions and actually building the products. And this is what I learned from building multiple Etsy shops, and it's the most effective way, and it's something that I talk to my students about too, on how they approach selling digital products on Etsy. So number one is identifying the gaps within each product category. There's usually a lot of subsections with a different style, different theme, different formats; there's a lot of different little nuances. So you want to figure out which area you want to tap into and focus in and see where there's demand and where there's less supply—meaning a lot of people are searching in that one specific category, but not a lot of other sellers know about it or tapping into it. So that gives you an opportunity and laser focus onto that part of the niche. For example, if you are doing digital planners, that is a really broad category, and within it there's a lot of different sub-niches. And if you do a little bit of digging, let's say on Erank, you can really figure out which part you want to focus on. One of them, for example, if you're doing the saving challenges planners, you can do 5K savings challenge planners, 20K savings planners, where these are more sub-niches, and within there you can do different color palettes, right? You can do different visual styles where you get very niche into a small demand market but way less competition. And if you're able to capitalize on that subcategory, you can definitely gain success that way and slowly expand into the different avenues. Number two is understanding the customer's needs. Before you get started, you want to fully understand what the customers are truly looking for. And one of the easiest ways to do that is look through competitor reviews. You can learn a lot about what customers like, especially usually if it's something that they really like, they will highlight it in the reviews. And from there you can see, okay, cool, maybe I want to highlight these features in there, or vice versa; people will talk about the things that they hated the most from a different product listing. From there you know, okay, I got to make sure I don't make that same mistake and I improve on my products compared to the competitors. So before you start your shop, make sure to do your market research. Skipping the market research phase is like setting off to sail but without a compass. A lot of people are making the mistake of spending all their time doing it without doing the proper researching prior, and trust me, there's a lot of missed opportunities when you go through that approach, because I've personally done all those mistakes of telling you now, as someone has been doing this for a while, to make sure to take that time to have the right preparations, do the right researching; trust me, it's going to save you in the long run 100%.
So just to wrap it all up, selling digital products, it is very similar to when you're doing print-on-demand or doing physical products, but there are certain nuances that are more specific for digital products. And for someone who has opened up multiple digital product shops, I can tell you that there's a procedure, there's a certain step-by-step process that can give you the most chances of success. If you want to learn more, you want to get a better understanding, make sure to check out my free Master Class that I'll have linked in the description. And in there I just walk you through everything, and exactly the step-by-step on how I like to approach the digital product shop realm. And hopefully I was able to kind of shed some light in terms of the overall of how digital products work, the benefits of it, how to get started, what platforms to go on. So hopefully that was helpful, and subscribe if you want to learn more. Until then, I will see you in the next video. Take care.