How to Sell Digital Products on a Blog – 5 Simple Steps!

Creating and maintaining a blog can be hard work when you aren’t earning money from it. It can take a while before you have a considerable amount of traffic and readers. Believe me, I’ve started blogs before around some of my hobbies. It was easy to give up on them when I didn’t see any money coming in from my efforts. I also didn’t see a lot of comments and feedback at the start of it. When I learned how to sell digital products on a blog, I was hooked. Now my writing efforts were not only feeding my creative spirit, but they were putting some money in my pocket! Click here to get step-by-step affiliate blog training. 

Step 1 – Find a Product

There are thousands of digital products online in almost every niche. Digital products are great because they are instantly delivered to your customers and the commissions tend to be much higher than physical products, some are up to 50%. Physical product affiliate commissions tend to be around 6-10% depending on the retailer. Amazon is one of the lowest at 6%, but it is one of the most trusted retailers with products in every niche.

There are a number of networks that you can go to in order to find the perfect digital product for your niche. I always check out Clickbank first because it is the easiest to use. JVzoo.com is another affiliate network that has plenty of digital products to promote.

Finding a product inside an affiliate network is simple, you just search for it. Another easy way to find affiliate products in your niche is to type into Google the keyword + affiliate. This will pull up a lot of different products that have affiliate networks.

Step 2 – Snag the Affiliate Link

You want to make sure that you get credit for the sale! It is essential that you use your affiliate link and not the sales page. The affiliate link will put a cookie on the website of the person who is reading your content. If they decide to purchase the product after being referred through your affiliate link, you will receive a commission.

In Clickbank, all you have to do to get the affiliate link, is to click on the promote button next to the product when you are looking at the different products in the marketplace. A pop-up window will appear and then you will copy the link. In JVZOO, the owners of the product have to approve you as an affiliate first before they will give you affiliate links.

Step 3 – Write a Review of the Product

Many people don’t know where to put their links or how to refer people to affiliate products. The best thing to do is to intermix your blog content with reviews that are relevant to your niche. For example, if your blog is about city gardening, you may want to include digital products that are related to square foot gardening or container gardening.

It doesn’t matter if you give the product a good review or a bad review. You want to give the product an honest review. People will trust you more when you are honest. Believe it or not, you can still earn a commission from a negative review. Some people may be dead set on buying the product anyway. Many people hear about a product and then google the reviews. This saves them a step. You provide them with the review and the link to the website.

Your review should be very informative. You should identify the pros and the cons of the product in your review. The review should also include who would benefit the most from the product. You also want to write about some features that make the product unique and special. Identify the selling points of the digital product.

You should purchase the product yourself and at least skim through them to see if your readers would be interested in it. Most digital online products do have a money-back guarantee, so if you determine that the product isn’t a great fit for you, you can return the product. You can also contact the owner of the product and ask for a free copy to review on your website if money is tight.

Step 4 – Add Some Visuals

One thing that is different about blogs than about writing books is that you need to have visuals to break up some text. People appreciate having something to look at when they are on websites. In books, pictures aren’t as necessary. People e

xpect to be scanning through a page that is text heavy when they read a book.

Once you finish writing your review, you’ll want to shop around for some pictures that you can use to promote the digital product. Be careful about just using any picture online. There are copyright issues with just using a picture you find when you search on Google images. However, since you are promoting a digital product, you can grab the pictures that are on the sales page. I use Jing to grab pictures and even testimonials from the sales page and use them on my own review.

You can use stock photo images on your website as well. Another great thing that you can do is go to Canva.com and create a banner for the digital product. Then you can have your audience click on the banner. You can use the banner on other pages that may be relevant, but not directly promoting the product.

Step 5- Share Your Review

Now, that you have a great review of a digital product that is relevant to your niche, it is time to get some traffic to it! You should start sharing your review on social media in order to get some instant traffic. The first places to start sharing are your family and friends, so start with Facebook and LinkedIn. You should also share it on Twitter, Pinterest and Google +. These networks will help you to get eyeballs on your review right away.

You can build a great following through social media, which will drive traffic to your blog. Ideally, you will want to focus on one social media network and build up a good following so that you can easily drive traffic to your website whenever you want to make sales. Learn how to tweet effectively or become an influencer in a Facebook group. Share your stuff on all networks, but focus on mastering and engaging in one network before moving on to learning another one.

Keep Learning and Growing

Your first few attempts at selling a digital product on your blog may not result in any sales. Don’t worry about it! That is normal. That may simply be due to the fact that your website is relatively new and there isn’t a ton of traffic yet. Keep learning about your niche. Continue to write and people will gain interest in your content. I joined the Wealthy Affiliate network as a way to learn affiliate marketing and stick with it until I actually was making sales. It was one of the best things that I did! The community provides me with great feedback to improve not only my writing and sales, but also the look and feel of my website.

As long as you stick with affiliate marketing, you’ll eventually be able to make sales from your blog. Just think about it, you’ll have this wonderful website that keeps getting bigger and better the more that you work on it. A traditional sales person has to continually build trust and make sales calls and redo his efforts with each new person. However, a blogger has many sales pages out there that can provide a nice source of passive income.