This blog post has been authored by Tina Dahmen, Dahmen Consulting OÜ
1. Digital Products Survive Any Epidemic – Yes, we have all learned our lesson from this Coronavirus. Many businesses have already gone bankrupt and many more will be hit. If you sell digital products online, your business is less like to be affected by any epidemic nor by any natural disaster (volcano eruption, tsunamis, earthquakes etc.).
On the contrary, when people are being forced to stay at home (more), they are more likely to surf online and come across your digital products and may end up purchasing them.
2. Low Barrier of Entry – You don’t need a huge amount of money to get started, but you can make a huge amount of money in return once you have launched. In fact, you can create your own online course with a budget of $0 and host it on and e-learning platform called Udemy for example.
I would never recommend you to do that as they take a crazy amount of commission. I would always recommend every online course creator to host their courses on their own e-learning platform using WordPress website and LearnDash for example.
3. Digital Goods are Low Maintenance – While some entrepreneurs argue that ‘you put in the work once and the digital goods are ready forever’, I disagree. No matter what your topic will be about, you will always learn new things about it, or things in your industry may even change.
Ideally, in order to stay the market leader and the best product provider in your niche, you want to keep adjusting and bettering your product. Always make sure you give the best for your customers and overdeliver.
4. Full Creative Control – You are your own boss and you are able to decide what you are going to write about in this chapter for your upcoming ebook.
You are the one who decides which lectures you are going to teach in your online course. There are no restrictions or laws put on online course creation just yet, so this is your time to get into it.
5. Unlimited Scalability – You will never run out of stock with digital products. You will always have ‘enough’ to deliver. You can have a million customers and you are still able to deliver. You can have another million running through the door right now and with the right system set up behind your digital product, everything can run smoothly and on autopilot.
Automatisation is key to create more freedom and time and that extra white space in your calendar.
6. Quality Control & Reliability to Deliver – You aren’t depended on any other stakeholders in the line, because there are none (apart from digital services which you can automize). When you have a digital product, you don’t rely on anyone else to perform any services for your customers. You have full quality control over the content you are putting out there since you are the one who produced it (hopefully).
Compare this to organising a holiday for people. You have the tour guides involved who don’t want to work or forget they need to. You have hotels involved which change the rates faster than you can change your own underwear. Flight companies cancel or delay their flights, volcano eruption or tsunami warnings scare people away and so on.
7. Access to the Global Market – Being online means being visible and having the opportunity to be seen by the entire world. You can use organic SEO in order to be visible and to show people your quality content.
You can reach more people than ever through online advertising (which is almost dead by the way, so I would always recommend partnering with influencers).
You have marketplaces like Amazon where you can list your book. Else you can list it on your own website. Again, this depends on what you are trying to achieve with your book. Is it authority or are you trying to make money? If you go for authority, Amazon is your place to list your book, if you are going for the money, definitely sell it on your own website.
8. High Margins – Who doesn’t love that? After you have created your own digital products, you can expect your Paypal notifications to keep pinging your smartphone.
The sky is the limit when it comes to profit margins, but the average online course creator makes between 100% – 1000% profit. Does this sound tempting? Again, sometimes the costs to create a course or an ebook can be $0, depending on how much you do yourself and how much you will outsource.
Some people spend some money on editing, website building or design. But those costs are a one-off, and once those bills are paid, everything else what comes after is pure profit.
9. Enhance Your Online Brand and Presence as a Whole – They say to have a book published is better than any business card! And I agree. Look how much more respect you automatically pay to someone when they tell you they are #1 Best Selling Author. Am I right? So why can’t this be you? It can!
Having a book or an online course published will increase your authority status as well as your following online. People will trust you faster and will buy from you a lot quicker, too.
10. You can be generous as eff. – Having your own digital goods means that you are able to give them away for free. You can take part in raffles, giveaways and challenges, even if they aren’t your own.
For example, when you are invited for an interview on a podcast, you could give your ebook away to the interviewer’s audience as a present for a short amount of time. Or if someone else (preferably not in your industry) runs a challenge and they are looking for donors to help to provide prices, this could be you.
These tactics create great brand awareness, other entrepreneur’s audiences get to know you better and have a chance to learn more about you through the free resources you have provided.What about you? – Are you ready to service more people, increase your revenue and create that extra while space in your calendar?
Are you ready to create your own digital products? Let’s speak and let’s figure out which one would be the best fit for you right now.
Tina helps business owners to monetize their presence like a boss via digital products (online courses, masterminds, membership sites, coaching programmes etc.), so they can serve more people with their expertise online, increase revenues and equally reduce working hours while staying aligned with their vision, mission and values. Her programmes and community help you to maintain a healthy work-life balance, make bank and have fun along the way.