How To Make Your First $100 Selling Digital Downloads

Before developing your first e-book, you need to reflect on your content and niche.

Questions to ask yourself:

  • What niche / topic does my content fall under?
  • What specific problem does my content solve for viewers?
  • What are the 1-2 most common questions I get from my followers (ex: in DMs / comments)?

Let’s look at Christine.Elizabeth (280K+ on Instagram) as an example:

Based on her IG Bio, Christine’s content falls under the following topics:

  • Health / Lifestyle
  • Personal Wealth / Finance

Once you know your niche, you need to know what the product is you’re going to sell for people.

To do this, answer the question: “What specific problem does my content solve for viewers?” for each of these topics:

  • Health

    • Looks like Christine posts a lot of meal-prep recipe content. One specific problem might be: “How do I meal prep healthy, keto-friendly meals every Sunday?”

      Personal Wealth / Finance

    • Looks like Christine posts about personal finance and financial freedom. One specific problem might be: “How can I budget every month so 20% of my salary can go into a smart stock portfolio?”

Keep in mind that BAD ALTERNATIVES are the reason why people will use your digital product.

Once you’ve got your list of potential digital products topics that address a highly specific pain-point or problem within your niche…

Do NOT go hire an expensive copywriter on Upwork or Fiverr. Do NOT go hire a manager to build the digital product for you.

Instead - you’re going to roll with your highly specific idea and use an AI tool to develop it quickly – see next chapter for details.

If you have a few different ideas and can’t decide which one to execute on - pick the 2-3 most specific ideas for a digital product and VALIDATE them by talking to your community (or you can tease the product ideas on an Instagram Live Q&A or run a poll or waitlist on your socials).

In the example of Christine.Elizabeth (280K+ on Instagram):

We determined her niche(s) were:

    • Health / Lifestyle
    • Personal Wealth / Finance

We also thought up the following two digital product ideas:

  • “How do I meal prep healthy, keto-friendly meals every Sunday?”

    or

  • “How can I budget every month so 20% of my salary can go into a smart stock portfolio?”


Instead of making a 50-page e-book on each of these topics…just talk a couple of your followers on Instagram DMs to see which topic is more helpful to them…or do one of the following:


  • Run an Instagram Story Poll announcing your up-coming e-books/guides and ask “Which of these two would be most helpful to y’all?”
  • Launch an e-mail waitlist for both e-book topics and see which performs better
  • Create two mini e-books/lead magnets with super basic info and offer them for free.

  • Go live and talk to followers


Pick the digital product topic that was more popular and focus on it — in the next step of our guide.

Once you've got your digital product - follow these steps to add it to your store and start selling.

Selling a Digital Download

First, read our article on Adding and Styling Digital Product Links. Be sure to select the Digital Download item in the selector.


Checkout Page

Now, you're ready to create the checkout page, where your goal is to drive purchases. Switch to the 'Checkout' tab near the top of the page. Just like before, you should lead with a checkout banner that represents your product well, in addition to another title/subtitle combo.

Next, give your product a clear and exciting description. Though it depends on the product you're selling, good descriptions are usually multiple paragraphs and may contain bullet points and styled text. You may use Pillar's AI tool to help you get a head start.


Pricing

Every digital download should have a price associated with it (some might be priced at $0). Pillar offers a variety of nuanced pricing options. For instance, you can set a discount to attract buyers. Another way to entice your audience to buy a product is to accept a coupon on your product. For instance, you can promote a coupon code on your Instagram Story that gives a 50% discount on a digital download (Note: Coupon discount is applied to the price after the original discount). All of these can be edited in the following screen.

Afterwards, you have the option of adding a custom question to your checkout page. One way you can use this custom question field is to collect user opinion on your product(s). A question like What do you hope to get from this guide can give you rich data regarding what your customers want.


Attaching Your Product

At this point, you have done almost everything needed to host a digital download on Pillar. If you already have the product ready, you can simply attach it using the button below, or send it as a URL.

If you still need to make the product, we recommend trying it on Canva, especially if it is a short guide. Canva is a great tool similar to Microsoft Word, except you have a lot more freedom to attach images and style pages. While you're working on the product, we recommend you to save the product as a draft so you don't lose all your hard work!


Advanced Features

In the Advanced tab on the top, you can adjust several features on your checkout page:

  • Checkout page color customizations
  • Extra fees
  • Custom message in confirmation email on each successful purchase
  • Fan reviews that show up on your checkout page


Now you have everything you need to start selling digital downloads on your Pillar creator store! Happy selling! 🚀🚀🚀

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