Are you an entrepreneur searching for your digital market niche in order to start selling digital products in 2024? Perfect - you have come to the right place!
The digital product space continues to grow exponentially and for entrepreneurs, this represents a great deal of exciting opportunity. In this diverse market that seems to expand at light speed, it can be hard to know where to start.
We will help you by zooming in on why the market continues to have so much to offer an entrepreneur, how to establish a niche that fits your skills and passions, what some of the most promising digital products are in 2024 and how to sell them.
Ready to dive in?
What is a digital product?
Digital products are intangible goods or services that can be created once and sold repeatedly online. Unlike physical items, which require constant reproduction, digital products offer the freedom to focus on improving and honing your products rather than creating more.
Digital products can take various forms, ranging from digital files like templates, tools, and online classes to downloadable content such as printable artwork and audio files. As technology advances and more people bring their ideas to this space, the diversity of ways to create and sell keeps on growing.
Creating quality digital products and focusing on a niche customer base can lead to long-term success and true potential for generating wealth.
Why is selling digital products so attractive to entrepreneurs?
There are many reasons why selling digital products has massive appeal to entrepreneurs — from low overheads with little upfront investment and the ability to sell to customers from all around the world.
In 2020, ecommerce sales totaled 4.28 trillion dollars, as reported by Statista.
This substantial figure shows the significance of the digital market. As well as the obvious demand that this figure reflects, there are many benefits for the entrepreneur that we will explore together.
1. Lower production and distribution costs
Digital products can be created and distributed with minimal resources, reducing the need for large-scale infrastructure or upfront investment.
2. Scalability and passive income potential
Once established, digital products can be scaled using strategies like webinars and social media ads, offering the potential for passive income with minimal effort.
3. Flexibility and adaptability
Digital products can easily be adjusted based on market demands and customer feedback, allowing for ongoing improvement and innovation.
4. Access to valuable analytics
Selling digital products provides access to analytics tools that offer insights into customer behavior, preferences, and purchasing patterns, enabling informed product refinement.
5. Low-stakes experimentation
Digital products offer a low-cost, low-time investment for testing ideas, with real-time feedback and tracking, making it an attractive option for experimentation.
6. Doing things on your own terms
Selling digital products represents a side hustle — something to bring in additional income alongside other income streams. Selling digital products can be done at your pace, in your time, and wherever you are.
What is the right digital product for me to start selling?
Finding the right product niche is crucial as it allows you to focus your skills, passions and efforts in order to differentiate yourself from competitors, and tailor your marketing to a specific, interested audience.
The prospect of finding a niche that will generate income can be daunting in what feels like such a saturated and competitive market, but we have some guidance to help you find your place in this picture!
Starting with your own skills, expertise and passions is a wise move.
Are you…
- A designer, developer or videographer who can share their journey and knowledge with others as a course, eBook or Blog?
- A music producer who has a host of loops and samples to sell to others starting out in your musical genre?
- A passionate baker or gardener or DIY buff who has know-how that would be of great value to others starting out?
- A skilled industry professional such as a project or production manager who’s learned to streamline processes and has templates and eGuides to share?
- A coach or wellness practitioner with ideas for a subscription-based online platform?
Your passion will inform who your audience is, and understanding your audience means you can address their needs and preferences — making them happy and in turn increasing your sales.
Let’s look at some key factors for you to consider when thinking about the right product for you:
1. Identify your passion and expertise
Start by exploring your interests, skills, and knowledge. Look for areas where you have a deep understanding or a unique perspective. Your passion and expertise will give you an advantage when creating and marketing digital products.
2. Research market trends and customer demand
Study the market landscape to identify emerging trends and customer demands in your area of interest. Conduct market research, analyze competitor offerings, and gather insights on your customers' preferences and pain points by reading reviews for similar offerings.
3. Validate your product ideas
Before investing time, energy and resources, validate your product ideas. Gather feedback from potential customers, user surveys, interviews, or prototype testing to gauge interest.
4. Focus on solving a problem or fulfilling a need
Successful products address specific problems or fulfill customer needs or desires. Put yourself in the shoes of your target audience and consider how your product can provide value.
5. Start small and iterate
Begin with a minimum viable product (MVP) or a smaller-scale release to test the market. Gather feedback, adapt, and iterate based on user responses and market insights. Gradually refine and expand your digital product based on customer feedback and evolving market needs.
6. Develop a strong online presence
Establish an online presence through a website, social media platforms, and content marketing. Share valuable insights, engage with your target audience, and build relationships.
7. Build a community and nurture relationships
Cultivate a community around your digital product by fostering engagement, providing customer support, and soliciting feedback.
8. Learn and adapt
Stay updated with industry trends, technological advancements, and pay attention to customer feedback. Embrace your critics and your fans alike and be open to incorporating new features or expanding into related niches as you grow.
Above all, be prepared to be patient! Finding your niche is a process that may require experimentation and adaptation.
How profitable is selling digital products?
Selling digital products can be highly profitable, with margins as high as 85% for some creators and entrepreneurs. When compared to selling physical products, the low production costs, no physical inventory and zero shipping costs are just some of the reasons that contribute to these high numbers.
One piece of advice we’ll give applies to many things in life, and that’s to take things one step at a time. You may have your eye on making 10k a month, which is great, but start out by focusing on your first $100 month and grow from there.
The great thing about digital sales is that you get incredible data and feedback from your customers that helps you hone, adapt, and build a great business over time.
What are the best digital products to sell in 2024?
In 2024 well established formats are taking new turns and more novel products are becoming successful in the market. Looking at what’s trending and developing in the digital market space helps inform what the best digital products for you to sell are.
AI tools such as ChatGPT and DALL-E are dramatically shifting barriers to entry in terms of you creating your own products.
Let’s take a look:
1. AI Prompts
Being able to use AI effectively will open doors for you in terms of what you are able to create. Good AI prompts — your way of interacting linguistically with AI to ask it to provide you with content — will have a huge impact on what you get from it.
Many people using AI tools like MidJourney are not skilled at prompting, and there are websites set up specifically to help with effective prompt creation.
If you are working in a specific product research area you can collect and bundle the successful prompts you have created to sell as a package to customers starting similar projects.
Interested in diving deeper?
Check out this video How I make Money Selling AI Prompts
2. Digital Workflows
Operations is one of the biggest headaches for people setting up their own businesses. If you have a successful workflow you can create this in a product like Zapier and sell the process format to people in your target audience online - allowing them to get on and be more productive thanks to you!
Check out this clip from Simply Digital’s video Sell 10 Easy Digital Products Using AI in 2024
3. eBooks & Guides
Ebook creation in 2024 is extremely accessible, owing to the assistance provided by AI and tools like Designrr. You can utilize your existing content, including podcasts, blog posts, video transcripts, and PDFs, to develop and sell ebooks or use them as lead magnets.
Take a look at Joe Popelas’ video How I Made $200,000 With ChatGPT eBook Automation at 20 Years Old
4. Printable wall art and patterns
While not a new concept in the digital realm, AI tools like MidJourney coupled with design platforms like Canva are making it super simple for anyone with the desire and an eye for design to successfully sell printable digital art.
Without much effort, you can see what styles and types of art are selling best currently on digital marketplaces such as Etsy, and use that as inspiration to create eye-catching pieces.
Popular YouTuber Alek dives into this topic in his video 7 Digital Products You Can Make Using AI
5. Digital Planners
The popularity of this format shows no sign of reducing. This is a space where you can really hone your niche expertise!
Exercise fanatic? Intermittent faster? A student with ADHD who’s devised amazing personal tools for keeping sane and on track?
There are going to be plenty of people out there wanting your help to organize themselves! With Canva templates and other online design tools, it’s never been simpler to create a beautiful offering for your target audience.
For inspiration, check out this blog article How To Create a Digital Planner to Sell for Coaches
6. Digital Courses
This sector continues to experience considerable growth. Online courses, once difficult to create, have now become more accessible and cost-effective, thanks to user-friendly platforms like LearningStudioAi
This presents a great opportunity for you to share your expertise with others waiting to learn.
Take a look at Simply Digital’s video Create your course for free with AI to get an idea of how smooth this process can be!
7. Digital Stickers
The popularity of digital stickers continues to rise, fed by the popularity of digital media such as planners, journals and messaging apps. Creating digital stickers with design tools such as Procreate and Canva is relatively simple and using your knowledge of your target audience, you can design playful, imaginative creations for your niche.
8. Canva Templates
This is a booming category of graphic templates that deserves its own spotlight. If you have Canva, Visme or other cloud design app skills, or are willing to spend some time gaining them, there is a huge demand for templates that can be personalized and updated, such as product labels and social media carousel designs, resumes and more.
Add in the fact you can create graphical elements in AI art generators and your ability to create truly unique offerings for your niche market is huge.
Inspired? Take a look at this clip from Simply Digital’s video Sell 10 Easy Digital Products Using AI in 2024
9. Icon Packs
Creating and selling icon packs can be an exciting and profitable venture in the digital design space. Icons are in high demand and with a diverse array of icon types, including aesthetic app icons, game icons, vector icons, 3D icons, and many more, you can carve out your unique niche to cater to various design needs.
Again, tools like Canva and Creative Fabrica enable you to bring your icon ideas to life without any previous design skills.
Further ideas
These are just some ideas that are experiencing growth and promise right now in 2024, but the list of ways to make sales in the digital download market is almost endless and includes categories such as:
- Music and Audio
- Documents
- Branding kits
- Fonts
- Presets
- WordPress themes
- Online community memberships
- Subscriptions to educational platforms…
…and many more! For a great exhaustive list of ideas, take a look at 77 digital product ideas you can sell online
How do I get started selling digital products?
When it comes to the question of where and how to sell your digital products, you have two main options: using a marketplace or selling from your own website or checkout page.
Each approach comes with its own set of pros and cons and is considered and balanced against your own needs, resources and time which can feel time-consuming.
Here we look at some high-level pros and cons to help you on your way.
Marketplace Pros:
- Established audience: Marketplaces like Etsy and Gumroad already have a large customer base, which can help you reach a wider audience.
- Less upfront cost: Setting up a store on these platforms can involve lower initial time expenses compared to building your own website.
- Ease of use: These marketplaces often provide user-friendly interfaces and tools for managing and promoting your products and are responsible for handling the sales tax.
Marketplace Cons:
- Fees and commissions: Platforms typically charge fees and/or take a percentage of your sales, affecting your profit margins. You will also often end up paying the highest possible rates of tax.
- Less ownership: The platform owns your customer database meaning you don’t have the ability to build relationships with and promote to them directly.
- Limited customization: You may have less control over the branding and customization of your store compared to having your own website or checkout page.
- Increased competition: With numerous sellers on these platforms, it can be challenging to stand out and attract customers amidst the competition. Time, energy and patience are required to get noticed.
Deciding how to move forward with your digital product sales can be a balancing act between ease of use and audience traffic and high costs and low control.
Building a website to sell and promote your products can feel like a headache when compared to the ease of use of a marketplace, however, digital product checkout pages make it super simple to sell digital downloads on your own terms, from anywhere that you interface with your customers.
How do I sell digital products with Checkout Page?
Checkout Page allows you to create standalone, no-code checkout pages from which to sell your products from a huge range of places such as your social media bio, your website, newsletters and blog articles.
If you already have an audience or want to build a community that you have full freedom to interact with — minus the limitations a marketplace entails — Checkout Page is a great option and you will also enjoy much lower costs.
Let’s take a look at some example checkout pages that have been created to sell exactly the kinds of digital products that are showing promise in 2024.
Example Digital Product Checkout Pages
Attractive, simple checkout pages for your products can be created and shared in under 10 minutes, with various payment options including subscription models:
Once your page is created, sharing is simple and you have multiple options at your fingertips:
Creating products to sell to your niche audience enables you to sell from anywhere you connect with them, with a range of attractive and simple layouts, fully customizable by you:
Your page can be shared as a QR code to place on leaflets and posters as well as online platforms:
Selling digital files is made super simple for creatives wanting to share their creations:
Adding files to your listing can be done in a few clicks, enabling your customers to access them quickly and easily:
This is just a small taster of checkout pages that can be created in just minutes. If you are keen to learn more about the best type of pages for the product you are interested in selling, why not read 9 types of checkouts (and when to use them)
If you’d like to start your 7-day free trial with us and experiment with creating some pages yourself, you’ll find lots of helpful information on our website, beginning with our Getting Started section.
Conclusion
The digital product landscape in 2024 holds immense promise for entrepreneurs seeking to tap into this expanding market. This is undoubtedly an exciting time for inventive creators to establish themselves in this ever-evolving landscape.
As we've explored, the benefits of selling digital products are vast, including lower production and distribution costs, scalability, flexibility, and access to valuable analytics. Coupled with the rising demand for digital goods, and the extraordinary ways in which AI can assist us in this field, this presents a significant opportunity for those willing to take the plunge.
Checkout Page can play a great supporting role in your journey, playing into the hands of those who want ease, independence, flexibility, total control of their audience relationships, and the lowest costs to enable the highest profit margins.
Your journey to entrepreneurial success through digital products in 2024 begins now — we hope we get to play a part in your adventure!
