Evolving To Sell Digital Products

There is a very common misconception when you sell digital products. That once you create them they are then easy to sell.

Hey, they are digital, they offer high profit margins, there is very little in the way of physical interaction with the product or its packaging :)

But. With this "ease" comes competition. And it is competition that is going to be the issue that you are going to face.

It is assumed that when someone releases a digital product they have no competition- that their product is unique.

In reality very few products are unique, what they do have is difference. Difference is what makes your product unique.

Evergreen? This only goes for the category. Categories are evergreen but the contents within them are not.

So Transport is an evergreen category. But the types of transport can change. The Ford Model T can not be used now as a car for the masses. But. Historical cars can be a new niche.

What happened, what now has changed to sell digital products?

Competition.

You will always have someone trying their best to copy you because that digital product is successful. We discussed about AdSense and how some of the keywords are high paying but have loads of competition.

I watched an interview with Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder) and he states that businesses have 2 years before competition comes in. Kindle? Nook came in 2 years later.

If you also notice. Regardless of their fan base, how many customers they have. Amazon still advertises. Amazon. One of the largest companies on the planet- still advertises.

Why?

Because it has a lot of competition. From tiny sites all the way to large companies like Temu. If Amazon doesn't evolve and change then it will be beaten. But, if it gets too big can it quickly change in time?

Amazon knows though that once they get customer to use Amazon they have a good chance to keep with Amazon. So it is the race to the customer.

If you are creating your first digital product then half way through you need to be starting to create another one.

You need to be maintaining customer service, satisfaction and making updates to the first product.

Some people make revisions of their first product and add more info- as time continues that info can be different/ change so it is wise to update. You listen to the customer, add ideas based upon what they have suggested. It also creates a pseudo new product and keeps the "brand" alive.

This update "new product" can clearly be seen within the car and online game industry. You can tell there are differences. In many ways it is better than the older product but that has to be seen- it also needs to carry over some of the features that made the previous iteration good. This is where it can be sticky and many companies forget.

When creating a new version there has to be a difference but there also has to be carry over from the previous version. You are building upon what people have liked.

I have noticed many books offer an additional chapter or updates for 20XX. But if I keep my original book, would that be OK- the basics are the same?

Our example

What we have done to update the digital product is to keep on building upon the base product. So with our music product we added more "how tos" to software that has come out. We added guides for new social media. We added more interviews and more FAQs. So it is like, sure the base product is still there, but instead of updating just with a chapter, we have recognised the changing landscape and added more to the product.

For us this might be additional work, but we can:

justify the price
subconsciously state that we are listening to our audience
keeps a product going which we know is helpful but needs updating

But. if we didn't do that then someone else will because:

they would see frustration and comments about why the product hasn't taken into consideration new developments
they can clearly see the older product was old and needed to be refreshed

So we had to change it, we had to update it.

Could we have created different digital products to fulfill customer satisfaction? Probably. But for the couple of dollars in profit for a small ebook it wouldn't be worth it. We make more profit and goodwill from a larger digital product than 1 additional smaller product. But what we can do is use the smaller product as a backdoor into the larger product.

Even the smallest of things like pdf to Kindle or other formats is an improvement. Creating an audio version. Even creating videos from the book is an improvement.

What some people have done is made the book free just for email subscribers. This is particularly helpful if you find that you can't update the product and you see that sales are declining. But you don't offer all the book straight away. You chop it up and make it a series covering a few emails- which reduces the subscribe-grab-unsubscribe mentality.

Check out more article in our blog here.

More ideas and thoughts on selling.

Sell digital products online case studies can be found here.