Digital products have two heavy advantages over physical goods: no shipping and no inventory.
Just imagine: you can create your product once and sell it to as many people as you want, from all around the world.
You might think that creating a digital product requires special knowledge and a huge portion of talent. Well, if we talk about music and art, that is definitely the case. But digital products are more than just songs or pictures, and some of them require no more than a well-thought-out plan and some time to create them.
Here’s a pretty diverse list of digital products to complement your storefront.
E-Books
With the rise of mobile devices, e-books are getting more and more popular.
The content can vary as much as:
- Student books
- Guides
- Magazines
- Manuals
- Checklists
- Stories
- Scripts
- Articles
- Comics
- Novels, and more
It’s best for those who own an educational business; sellers of complicated products like electronics; kids’ stores; and housekeeping products. Also, if you are targeting the fitness and healthcare niche, it opens opportunities to create training guides, diaries, and diet schedules.
Music and Audio Products
If you are a musician born in the 21st century — how lucky you are!
With all those modern instruments, tools, software, the variety of music genres, and the power of the internet, you just can’t miss your chance to create music for a living.
Selling music products in your online store is a good start to fundraise money for recording your first platinum album. If you are good at singing and playing musical instruments, you can try selling:
- Songs
- Jingles
- Beats
- Covers (remember to take care of the copyright)
- Ringtones
- Soundtracks
- Voice recordings for podcasts and ads
There’s one more product you can create with nothing but your own voice — audio books!
Just like with cover songs, it’s important to avoid violating someone’s copyright, but some research and contacts with authors will bring success, on condition that you have a decent pronunciation and a magnetic voice.
Research
If you know enough about statistics and data, why don’t you do research for people who need them?
Tutorials
It’s never too late to learn — and that’s a bottomless pit of opportunities to teach somebody something.
Let’s say your online store sells guitars. Opportunity detected! You can sell tutorials on how to play them. This is true for many other niches, too.
Tom McLaughlin sells online and offline classes on woodworking. In his online store, you can buy plans alongside with video tutorials and archived classes on how to create awesome wooden products.
Tutorials and courses can be recorded on video or in audio format, like this store does.
Software
Who is on the other side — a talented developer? Your projects have been waiting in a corner of your hard drive long enough. If you are a beginner in coding, there’s nothing better to test your skills than getting out there and giving it a try.
Web Elements
Sortfolio alone lists about 1.5 million web design studios — needless to say, this job is very sexy today.
Besides regular projects, almost every web designer creates something “from the heart” from time to time. It may be stickers, clip art, buttons — generally speaking, products of random inspiration. Guess what our advice is? At least, add a store to your Facebook page to sell them, because every business needs a website nowadays.
Blueprints and Plans
Just like the example above, SDS Plans sells house, garage, and cabin plans — only without teaching you how to build them.
Architects may find it a nice approach to online presence: it might be easier to promote a store with ready-made plans than by completing individual orders.
Recipes
Recipes can be sold to many people — not only housewives.
If you have a food blog, recipes will be a good way to monetize it. If you’ve got a cookie recipe from your grandmother, but you do not want to open your own bakery, you can make a website and sell the recipe to restaurants, bakeries, and cuisine magazines.
Do not neglect your cooking skills or the secret family recipes you know — you can win a contest and add value to your recipe by rewarding it with a medal.
Choose Instagram for your marketing strategy, learn more about beautiful food photography, and share links to recipes on your online store.
Tickets
A lot of stores sell tickets. Nowadays, you can buy tickets for every kind of performance, from comedy shows to wrestling.
DIY Printables
Geometry fans will absolutely love this. Polygonal Paper is a unique store that sells blueprints and plans, which you can print and use to make your own trophy head, from lions to unicorns. Not a single animal was hurt!
These sculptures are super light and easy to DIY, but the store owners still provide you with video tutorials and recommendations for the paper.
Think out of the box and you’ll find more DIY product ideas — some of which are really surprising.
Photography
Rather than submitting your photos to photo stock websites that normally pay the owner as little as 30% of the deal, consider opening an additional sales channel. Most photographers tend to have their own websites with a photo gallery.
It’s a matter of minutes to add a store to your website and sell photographs.
So what ideas work for your niche? Which one will you try out next? Be bold!
