Creating a popular digital product that everyone loves takes a lot of effort, time, and resources. With this in mind, you need to come up with a monetization model for your digital product. In this post, we’re going to give you an in-depth guide on how to monetize a digital product and ensure that you’re getting the value.

With over 1.1 billion websites on the Web today, the competition is fierce among online businesses to have the best online product. Still, many of them are quite successful in providing value and exceptional digital service to their customers. These often include goods such as data services, software, content, and analytics sold to users online.

Although websites and browser extensions are just two product types, below you’ll find some of the most common digital products sold by online businesses around the world:

  • Videos;
  • Digital photography;
  • Podcasts;
  • eBooks;
  • Digital artwork and NFTs;
  • Software plugins;
  • Coaching programs;
  • Subscriptions.

These digital products can help maximize revenue for online businesses (whether it’s a company or an influencer). You can build passive profit revenue streams by licensing these items or selling them directly to make decent money without equal expenses.

What is Digital Monetization?

Digital product monetization is essentially a way of choosing how your digital product is going to make money. Make sure you know it right from the start.

Your monetization strategy should outline the steps you should take when launching your product and preparing it for monetization.

For example, if you create videos on YouTube, you can monetize them by signing up for an affiliate program or you can license your content in exchange for money.

Alternatively, you can join the YouTube Partner Program if you live in a country or region where it is available.

By coming up with a digital product monetization strategy early, you will make sure that your product generates revenue as soon as you launch it and gain traction.

How to Monetize a Loyal Audience by Selling Digital Products

If you have a loyal fanbase, which is genuinely interested in your content, you can use your digital product to monetize an audience.

For example, if you’re running a popular blog, you can offer products that are relevant to your niche, or even combine different monetization strategies.

Whatever you’re blogging about, from travel, cooking, or teaching English online, you can monetize your audience by promoting products that complement your content.

Making money online is all about earning an income from the value you offer your audience.

When you provide your audience with a product or service of value, you can expect something in return.

Why You Should Adopt Digital Business Model

Now let’s take a quick look at how the digital business model can benefit you and your small business.

Reduced Overhead Costs

While every digital product has development and distribution costs, these are considerably lower than that of a physical product.

You don’t need to rent a warehouse to keep your stuff and you don’t need resources and entities to form the path for a product to the markets.

When it comes to creating a digital product, you will require just a few items such as:

Generate a Passive Income

After an initial investment has been made, it becomes a lucrative passive income source.

Since there’s no physical inventory to keep, you can sell digital products over and over again.

In addition, you don’t have to spend money beyond creating the digital product unless you want to increase your marketing budget.

You are in control of every dollar that you spend after the launch of your digital product.

There Are Simple Metrics For Measuring Digital Product Success

With a number of online tracking tools, you can easily track the performance of your digital products and maximize your profits.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can give you plenty of food for thought when it comes to creating a solid digital marketing strategy. Some of the most popular KPIs to track for online business include:

  • Cost per Click (CPC);
  • Reach & impression growth rate;
  • Follower growth rate;
  • Traffic directed to your site;
  • Engagement rate and engagement on reach;
  • Sales generated;
  • Referral traffic;
  • Pageviews;
  • Average time spent on your site;
  • Conversion rate.

Build and Manage Multiple Income Streams

Many business owners have multiple income streams and don’t rely just on selling a digital product.

Some of them prefer creating a group of different products that can be monetized separately, others are still working a cubicle job.

Regardless of your choice, you can build multiple income streams to maximize your potential in each field available to you.

How to Monetize a Digital Product?

The monetization model you pick must correspond with the entire user experience and the structure of your digital product.

It’s better to decide on the monetization model of a digital product early to seamlessly align monetization into the product features and user flow.

D.Y.O.R.

To start with, before even thinking about product monetization, you need to accurately identify the target audience for your product.

Questions You Should Be Asking Yourself:

  • What are the audience needs?
  • How much are your potential clients willing to pay for your digital product?
  • Are they actually willing to pay for it?
  • Will they like a digital product with the chosen monetization model?

Do your own research by logging into Google Trends and see what topics and queries have been popular in searches and could potentially help to increase sales for your small business.

Next, check the Google Keyword Planner in Google ads. This tool can analyze the keyword searches and find out how competitive the market is for each of the words.

You may want to pick profitable niches with low competition and keen customer interest.

Here’re some other keyword research tools you may want to check:

  • SEMrush;
  • KWFinder;
  • Ahrefs Keyword Explorer;
  • GrowthBar;
  • Long Tail Pro;
  • Majestic;
  • Keyword Tool.

Another great thing to do before monetizing a digital product is to check customer reviews to see which offerings might appeal most to customers.

It can be a win-win solution to create a digital product in a niche that you know while providing value to users.

In addition, you’ll be interested in the product for longer than if you have no interest in what you do.

Create a Digital Product That Sells Easily

It is great when you have a profitable product to sell online. And here’re the key provisions to consider before creating it:

  • Come up with a format. Will it be a product license, subscription model, or a sponsorship;
  • Understand what product features drive value for your customers. Meeting customer expectations is the halfway to success;
  • Leave open the possibility of adding additional features to the existing digital products. This will give you a great option for earning extra income from your digital product;
  • Will there be any updates to keep your digital product relevant?

    • Develop a Pricing Strategy For Your Digital Product

    When it comes to monetizing a digital product, the pricing part is arguably the most overwhelming part.

    Price incorrectly, and you might devalue your product, which eventually leads to a poor perception of your brand.

    Price correctly, and you’ll boost your sales, increase customer satisfaction, and build a great brand reputation.

    Again, you need to compare prices for digital products in your niche and figure out the highest price your customer is willing to pay for products like yours.

    You may want to check the consumer price index to get an idea of how the price has changed over time. With the value of your digital product in mind, you can easily develop a pricing strategy.

    Establish Audience Loyalty

    Now let’s face it, you can not monetize a digital product without an engaged audience. Period. You need a loyal fan base if you want to sell your product and this, of course, requires time and effort.

    To get faster results, you can drive traffic from social media to a landing page you need and promote your digital product.

    Consider paid social media advertising if you have the budget. If you don’t, you may offer a free trial for your product in exchange for an email address.

    An email marketing list is a cornerstone for any email marketing campaign, especially when it comes to launching a new digital product.

    Launch Your Digital Product

    You’ve made it this far! It’s a product launch day! So make it memorable.

    • Create a winning promo content;
    • Send announcement emails to everyone in the email list;
    • Run paid social media ads;
    • Offer an early bird discount;
    • Ask for feedback and testimonials.

    Measure a Product’s Success

    A good rule of thumb is to measure your product performance right from the start.

    If there is positive feedback from users and little improvement is needed, continue checking the trends and analytics.

    Otherwise, you must quickly fix the problem and ensure it won’t happen again.

    At any life cycle of a product, it’s important to get detailed and actionable feedback from your customers. In this case, you know exactly what they like and whether they have any dislikes.

    People will appreciate your responsiveness if you can quickly process feedback.

    Make Money with Partner Marketing

    If you’re looking for ways to make over $50.000 in passive income then partner marketing is your best bet.

    Bring additional value to your followers by promoting top brands and their products to your audience. It doesn’t have to be irrelevant products though.

    When you sign-up as a publisher, you can get paid by a brand for sales resulting from your referrals. An affiliate network will generate a referral link (or links) so that they could exactly know who referred leads.

    When your audience clicks on an affiliate link and generates a sale, you will receive the agreed commission.

    If you’re serious about partner marketing, it’s important to ensure that the product that you recommend adds value to your audience or you could harm your own reputation.

    Admitad offers a number of great tools to start making money with affiliate marketing.

    Regardless of the platform you’re currently working on, Admitad is an all-in-one solution for website owners, digital product creators, and social media influencers alike.

    Can You Make Money Selling Digital Products?

    If you know what a particular audience wants, you can make money by selling digital products. By satisfying their needs and adding value you can also build trust with your audience and establish yourself as an expert.

    Digital products don’t require a ton of experience or money. If you’re already an expert in your field, you can sell your skills or expertise and then find a market for your digital product.

    What is also great, the same product can be sold to different audiences across the globe.

    Many content creators also repurpose digital products to develop new products and services that they can up-sell or cross-sell.

    Monetization Models for Digital Products

    1. Make Money by Recommending Products

    Partner marketing is a lucrative monetization model for digital products. About 81% of brands rely on affiliate programs to drive more sales, and it has never been easier to monetize your products with referral links.

    For example, you can monetize your software that needs a custom approach, monetize a mobile app, or browser extension. Admitad Partner Network is here to help.

    There are 3,000+ advertisers and 80 advertising networks cooperating with Admitad. Choose brands that appeal most to your community. Or create your own all-in-one monetization solution that your followers will be interested in.

    These are only a handful of brands that you can join via Partner Network:

     

    2. Subscriptions

    A lot of online businesses use the subscription model but it is particularly common with digital products such as mobile apps, games, and business software that professionals use regularly.

    Subscription-based services usually revolve around a recurring revenue model in which users pay a monthly, or yearly fee to access premium solutions.

    They can renew their subscription after (or before) it expires.

    If you have a digital product, a subscription model can be a very effective approach to monetizing it. Merely because you can create different subscription plans and give your customers freedom to choose how long and how often they want to receive each offer.

    3. Product Licenses

    Licensing digital products comes in all shapes and sizes. Popular streaming services buy licensed content from record labels, independent creators, or other production companies.

    Evidently, there’s no reason why you can’t license your proprietary technology to others too.

    For example, another well-known audio recognition technology is often licensed to other companies to boost its revenue stream.

    Realizing your API-as-a-product or Data-as-a-product strategy is an excellent way to monetize digital products that include features, APIs, or data other online businesses could use.

    4. Launch a Coaching Program

    While not strictly related to digital products, starting a coaching program is still a great way to monetize your expertise.

    Self-improvement ideas are incredibly popular in the digital world, and the audience will surely benefit if you have knowledge in a particular field.

    There is always something to learn from others, and chances are your audience would like to improve with your help.

    Before launching a coaching program, figure out what are the audience’s specific needs. Maybe you can help them right from the start without even having to create a digital product.

    You can start with one-on-one consultations where you get paid for your time and advice. At the same time, if you have an audience that faces common problems you may decide to begin a group coaching format instead. In this case, you may charge for paid webinars and add value to group members.

    Naturally, you can combine both approaches to generate more income at once.

    Wrapping Up. How to Monetize a Digital Product

    With online sales booming, many Internet entrepreneurs come up with ideas and start selling digital products.

    Since you don’t need to spend much money on storing and production, the startup costs for online businesses are usually lower than when starting a traditional offline business.

    Digital products are infinitely scalable as you can sell the same items over and over again at no additional cost to yourself. Even if you don’t have the skill to digitize, it is possible to make substantial profits promoting a product or service made by another retailer or advertiser.

    This post has explained the process of monetizing digital products. We’re convinced that all of these ideas are perfect for anyone interested but perfect for content creators and influencers looking for passive income ideas for building wealth.

    Are there any other product monetization strategies that you know of? Let us know in the comments section below!