Creating content is one thing. Making money from it? That’s where many creators get stuck. The good news is that digital products offer a realistic path to monetization without the headaches of physical inventory, shipping logistics, or manufacturing costs. If you’ve been creating content consistently – whether it’s podcasts, videos, or blog posts – chances are you already have something worth turning into a digital product and start selling. Physical merch is always an option, but your margins might be minimal if you sell T-shirts or mugs.
Your podcast series about productivity? It could be a mini-course. Those templates you use in your workflow? Other creators would probably pay for them. The expertise you share for free every week? Package it into a guide.
The creators who succeed to sell digital products tend to start small. A simple PDF guide priced at $9 can validate demand before you spend months building an elaborate online course or developing more products. It’s about testing what your audience actually wants, not guessing what they might need.
What Are Digital Products Anyway?
Think PDFs, video courses, ebooks, templates, playbooks, planners, private content, fonts, graphic assets, or software – anything delivered digitally instead of shipped in a box. The possibilities are really endless, so products can consist of any digital file that provides value to your customers.
The upside of digital products is clear, you can create it once, or repurpose your existing content, then sell it forever. Whether one person or a hundred people buy your guide, the work is already done. There’s no manufacturing, no warehouse, no shipping labels to print or trips to the post office!
The ongoing costs are minimal too. Payment processing fees typically runs around 2-3%, and you might need basic hosting. Compare that to physical products where every sale means more inventory, packaging materials, and shipping calculations.
What stops most creators isn’t the complexity – it’s the misconception that you need a huge audience or technical expertise. A food blogger with a modest email list can sell a $19 recipe collection successfully (this works even with lists under 500 subscribers!). A podcaster can package their best interviews into a paid resource. It’s never too early to start selling, but keeping focused on growing your audience and traffic sources is always key.
Most popular digital products
The digital product landscape is wide, but certain types consistently perform well for creators. If your audience is used to seeing those types of products online or purchase those from creators like yourself, it can make things easier for you as well.
E-books and Guides
This is often where creators start, and for good reason! If you’ve been writing blog posts or show notes for any length of time, you already have the raw material.
The smart approach is repurposing existing content. Take your best-performing blog posts, organize them around a theme, add some additional insights or exercises, and you’ve got an e-book.
This is essentially a PDF or document file with good content – it can be anything from templates, planners, playbooks, or a full 500-page eBook – it’s really up to you to decide.
Online Courses and Workshops
Courses usually go at a higher price point because they deliver structured learning over time. They also involve more planning, production and post production work since most are video-based.
The topics are nearly limitless here as well. Marketing strategies, design fundamentals, photography techniques, cooking, productivity systems, coding basics – if you can teach it, someone wants to learn it!
The key is focusing on skills or knowledge your audience actually needs, not just what you find interesting. Make sure there’s enough demand before you commit to working on producing a course. Producing high quality courses and content can involve lots of work before starting to see any revenue from it.
Templates and Printables
Templates sell because they eliminate work. Business owners need invoices and contracts. Content creators need social media graphics and content calendars. Everyone appreciates a spreadsheet that actually makes sense!
What’s more, templates are relatively easy to create.
The value proposition is time. Someone will gladly pay $15 for a template that saves them three hours of setup and formatting. For many buyers, that’s an obvious deal.
Customers typically customize templates to fit their needs, which means they still get something that feels unique to them while you maintain the leverage of selling the same base product repeatedly.
Digital Downloads
Digital downloads means any downloadable file you can sell or offer your users. This category covers media assets – stock photos, graphics, music loops, sound effects, video footage, editing presets, fonts, and design elements.
If you can create products from your existing work, that’s a great way to generate new revenue streams. Photographers can package their editing presets. Musicians can sell sound libraries they’ve already built for their own projects. Designers can turn custom icons or graphics into sellable packs.
Look at what you’re already creating and ask whether other creators in your space would find it useful.
Membership Content
Memberships generate recurring revenue instead of one-time purchases. The model works when you can deliver ongoing value – exclusive content, community access, monthly resources, or continued learning.
Platforms like Beamly let you run memberships from your own website without giving up a percentage of your revenue beyond standard payment processing fees. You can offer access to premium podcasts, videos, online courses or blog posts. With a membership website you can easily monetize your digital products and create subscriptions, products or bundles.
Coaching and Consulting Materials
If you’re already coaching or consulting, productizing your expertise can help. Frameworks, assessment tools, strategy templates, or recorded training sessions let you serve more people without trading time for money directly.
Creating Your First Digital Product
The best starting point is usually obvious once you pay attention to what your audience asks about most. Don’t try to invent a new need – solve an existing one (seriously, this is the most common mistake). The product that makes sense is probably the one that feels like a natural extension of what you’re already doing.
If your audience is still small and your time is limited, start with something you can create relatively quickly – a focused guide or template that addresses one specific problem. Pricing it between $5-39 makes it an easy yes for early adopters.
Even if your product is super simple, we don’t recommend to go with a price under $5 – you’d have to get thousands of customers before it can grow into a sustainable revenue stream.
The type of content your create really depends on your audience and your own preferences, but courses have always been a popular option. Creators who are comfortable teaching and have some audience traction, a course can work really well. Record a few lessons with supporting materials and you can charge $49-149 per customer, if not more for larger courses.
Membership models make sense when you have an engaged community and can commit to delivering something valuable each month. Recurring revenue can really change your life once you find the right product to sell and the right marketing funnel.
How Do You Figure Out What to Create?
If you already have an audience, that’s the best way to learn and iterate.
What questions come up repeatedly in your comments, DMs, or emails? What topics generate the most engagement when you post about them? What problems do people in your space consistently struggle with?
Consider your professional skills, the problems you’ve solved in your own work, content that’s performed particularly well, and recurring questions from your audience. These patterns usually point toward viable product ideas.
Validate Before You Build
Spending weeks creating a product nobody wants is frustrating, but can be avoided. Look for signals that demand exists before committing significant time.
Search your topic on Google, YouTube, Instagram, Reddit or any other platform where your audience is. Check what existing products serve this space. Find a few competitors and study their offerings, pricing, and customer reviews. Reviews are particularly valuable because they highlight what’s working and what’s missing. Those gaps represent opportunities.
If you have an audience, ask them directly! A simple poll or question about their biggest challenge right now will surface useful information. Direct feedback beats guessing every time.
Your Audience Already Knows What They Want
If you have podcast listeners, blog readers, email subscribers, or social media followers, you have a great source of product ideas available. These people already know your work and trust your perspective.
Look at what content generates the most questions, which posts get saved or shared most, and what struggles come up repeatedly in comments or messages. Patterns in these interactions often reveal exactly what people would pay to solve or learn.
Creating Your Digital Product
Once you’ve validated an idea, the actual creation process matters more than many creators expect. A few principles make the difference between products that sell and ones that sit ignored!
Keep Your Tools Simple
Using tools you already have experience working with can help speed up your process.
For example, Google Docs can be great for your e-books, guides and spreadsheets. Canva works well for basic design templates and layout.
Membership content requires more infrastructure – video hosting, a content platform, possibly community features. This is where all-in-one platforms like Beamly make sense, handling the technical pieces so you can focus on content.
Test With Real Users
Before launching widely, get your product in front of a small group. Offer it at a discount to existing customers, community members, or colleagues who fit your target audience.
Focus your questions on clarity (was anything confusing?), outcomes (did it deliver what was promised?), and satisfaction (would you recommend it?). This feedback lets you fix problems before they affect your reputation or generate refund requests.
Early testers often become advocates if the experience is good. They’ve seen the product evolve and feel invested in its success.
A great advantage of digital products is that you can always improve them based on feedback – you’re not committed to one version like if you had a mass-produced physical product that cannot be changed – you can always iterate and that’s a superpower.
Free Content as a Trust Builder
Offering valuable free content before asking for a purchase helps establish credibility. A free eBook, course, or template demonstrates your teaching style and expertise (think of it as a free sample!).
The free offering should solve a small problem completely rather than partially solving a bigger one. It’s a sample that builds confidence in your paid products, not a teaser that leaves people frustrated.
Setting Up Your Sales Platform
The platform you choose affects your profit margins, control over customer relationships, and long-term sustainability! This section covers where to sell and how to set up your store.
Selling From Your Own Website
Platforms like Patreon typically charge you 8%-12%, while keeping their branding over yours. You’re building on someone else’s platform under their rules. More importantly, you don’t own the customer relationship – you can’t always easily migrate those buyers to your own platform later.
When you sell from your own website, you get complete control. You own the customer data, set your own terms, and aren’t subject to platform policy changes or fee increases.
The profit margins are better too. Beyond standard payment processing (typically around 2.9%), there are no platform fees taking a cut of each sale (depending on the platform you use). This difference compounds significantly as volume grows.
The trade-off is responsibility for marketing and driving traffic. Unlike marketplaces with built-in discovery, you need to bring customers to your site through content, SEO, email marketing, or paid advertising.
Platforms like Beamly simplify the technical side with a built-in online store, online courses, membership features, and digital product delivery – all with 0% platform fees (standard Stripe fees do apply).
Marketing Your Digital Products
Even if you’ve created the best possible product, it’s worth exactly 0$ if nobody knows about it. Without marketing, you can’t go far with digital products. Getting your product in front of the right people (and many of them) requires consistent effort across multiple channels.
Creating the products and setting up your online store or website is one part, but do plan ahead and make plenty of room for marketing work.
For creators with an established website, audience or content – integrating products into your existing platform makes sense. Platforms like Beamly let you publish podcasts, videos, and blog posts while selling digital products from the same professional website.
Selling on Social Media
Social platforms work better for relationship-building than direct sales, but they play a great supporting role. Share helpful tips, engage with your audience, showcase customer results, answer questions, and create short-form content.
SEO – Takes Time But Compounds
Optimizing product pages for search takes months to show results, but the effort compounds over time. Use relevant keywords in titles and descriptions, create detailed content that answers buyer questions, and gather customer testimonials for fresh content.
Product pages won’t rank overnight, but traffic from search converts well because people are actively looking for solutions.
Conclusion
Digital products offer creators a realistic path to sustainable income with high margins. Success doesn’t require a massive audience or technical expertise – it requires solving real problems and selling quality products for people who need them!
Creators building sustainable businesses with digital products share common patterns. They start with products that address actual audience needs. They ship imperfect first versions and improve based on feedback.
Beamly gives creators the infrastructure to sell digital products without platform fees beyond payment processing. Publish content, build your audience, add memberships, sell products – all from your own professional website, and without coding!
Stop planning. Start building. The only way to know if something works is putting it into the world.
