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Today I wanted to tell you a little story about what I learned from selling my first digital product!
The year was 2017, and I had just started this blog. My plan was to earn money from display ads and affiliate links on my website.
Then I learned about digital products. Back in 2017, the concept of digital products (like ebooks and online courses) was not nearly as saturated as it is now. You also couldn’t just use AI to generate some generic slop and start selling it.
Everything was typically higher quality. I personally bought some ebooks and online courses about blogging that were very helpful when I was first starting out.
After a couple of months of growing my blog, I discovered something amazing. I was using Pinterest to drive traffic back to my website and blog posts, but I was also sharing affiliate links directly on Pinterest and making sales.
I didn’t see anyone else talking about affiliate marketing on Pinterest at the time, so I saw the perfect opportunity to create something. I wrote a 50-page ebook (really even shorter than that because a lot of it was filled with screenshots) explaining my exact process for making affiliate sales directly on Pinterest.
This was not a fancy ebook. I literally made it in Google Docs, exported it as a PDF, and used Canva to design a simple cover for it.
Then I uploaded it to a platform for selling digital products (which I no longer use – I recommend Payhip now because it’s free and super easy to set up!) and listed it for $17.
And to my shock and delight, the sales started rolling in immediately.
I sold that ebook for a little over eight years, and in that time, I earned just over $100,000. That works out to an extra $1,000 a month from a single ebook I sat down and created in the span of one full day back when I was in college.
If you’ve been around for a while, you might remember exactly what that ebook was called: Get Paid to Pin.
I’ll talk more about why I stopped selling this particular ebook and whether I think digital products are still worth it (spoiler alert: yes) further down.
But first, let’s get into the lessons I learned from six figures in sales from one ebook:
1. People are really paying for outcomes, not information.
The most successful digital products sell an outcome, not just information. People can find plenty of free information online already.
My ebook promised to get them from Point A to Point B, and gave them an exact strategy they could follow to do it.
And yes, maybe they could have even figured it out themselves by reading 15 blog posts, watching three hours of YouTube videos, going down too many Internet rabbit holes, and spending weeks on trial and error.
Or they could pay $17 for a 50-page ebook and figure it out in a few hours.
That is what makes people actually click purchase on a digital product.
2. Done is better than perfect.
Your first digital product does not need to be fancy. I just wrote my ebook in Google Docs and used Canva to create a cover design. That’s it.
I created a basic sales page on my WordPress blog to sell my ebook, but you really don’t even do that. Platforms like Payhip offer a built-in sales page editor.
Don’t spend six months agonizing over creating the perfect product. In fact, I really don’t think any digital product should take you more than a week to create.
Just make the best version you can, and launch it.
Your first draft does not have to be the final product you sell forever. I made plenty of updates to my original ebook over the years, both to the design and the content itself.
The most important thing is that you just start. You’ll never get anywhere if you keep telling yourself you’re not “ready” to start selling something yet.
3. You don’t need a huge audience to make sales.
When I first started selling my ebook, I had a very small audience.
I had a blog that was getting several thousand page views per month from Pinterest. I had an email list with a few hundred subscribers. And that was about it.
You don’t need a lot of people to see your digital product. You just need the right people to see it. If you have a product that solves a specific problem for a specific type of person, you can easily make sales with a surprisingly small audience.
I think a lot of people get stuck on thinking they need a big audience first.
But this is just another form of procrastination. Much like thinking your digital product needs to be “perfect” before you can sell it, don’t get caught up thinking you need to have hundreds of thousands of followers or subscribers first either.
4. Get creative with your marketing.
So how did I make sales beyond my existing audience, especially in the first year or so when my overall audience was still quite small?
I got creative with my marketing. And I wasn’t afraid to promote my ebook everywhere I could, because I truly believed in what I was selling.
I started leaving comments in Facebook groups for bloggers (as long as the group rules allowed for it) telling people about my ebook if I thought it would help them.
I made hundreds of Pinterest pins promoting my ebook, with a link leading to the sales page where people could read more about it and purchase it.
I even started my own affiliate program for this ebook, so other people could sign up as an affiliate after reading it and start promoting it themselves, earning a commission on every sale they generated.
5. Your best ideas are hiding in your own experience.
I came up with the idea for this ebook not because I sat down and did hours of research and brainstorming for the “perfect” topic.
It came about because I was already doing something that was working, and I decided to document it.
Your own experience is the best place to turn for digital product ideas.
What have you figured out that other people struggle with? What do people constantly ask you about? What mistakes have you made that you can help someone else avoid?
These are all great questions to ask yourself to uncover great digital product ideas.
6. Specific is better than broad.
My ebook wasn’t about “how to make money online” or even “how to make money blogging”. It was about “how to use Pinterest to make money from affiliate marketing”.
And I think that very specific niche is part of the reason it was so successful.
You don’t want to try to solve too many problems at once.
Pick one specific topic, and create the ultimate solution for it.
A digital travel guide to Japan for gluten-free travelers. A printable binder pet owners can leave for pet sitters. A financial and budgeting spreadsheet system for wedding photographers. An online course about how to start an Amazon KDP coloring book business. Don’t try to help everyone — get specific.
7. You don’t have to be an expert.
Imposter syndrome is your enemy. Don’t let yourself get caught up in thinking, “I’m not an expert, why would anyone listen to me?”
Every person on this Earth has something they’re qualified to talk about. You don’t need to be an expert. You just need to be a few steps further along on your journey than the person you are creating for.
I was a college student who had only discovered online business and affiliate marketing a few months before.
But I didn’t claim to be an expert. I was simply saying, “This is what I did, this is what worked for me, and here’s how you can do it, too.”
So why did I stop selling this ebook?
And now let’s address what might be the elephant in the room: If this ebook was so profitable, then why did I stop selling it?
The honest answer is that I no longer felt confident in the strategy I was selling. The Internet had changed. Affiliate marketing had changed. And most importantly, Pinterest had changed.
The way I made money from affiliate links directly on Pinterest was no longer working the way it had worked for years. So I obviously did not feel comfortable selling an ebook about tactics that were no longer viable.
Over the years, I had made regular annual updates to the ebook when certain information became outdated, or I had tweaked my strategy to keep up with Pinterest’s many algorithm updates.
But at a certain point, I realized it was time to simply retire the ebook. Digital products can be evergreen, but they’re not immortal.
Are digital products still worth it?
This is an easy question to answer: Yes, absolutely, they’re still worth it.
But the landscape has changed, and success looks different now than it did in 2017.
With AI, people have more access to information than ever before. You don’t need to spend as long poring through blog posts and YouTube videos and Reddit threads and newsletters and social media posts to get answers.
More than anything, it’s important that digital products you create are:
- Based on your own experience and not easily replicable
- Offering a specific outcome for a specific audience
- Giving people a shortcut to the solution they’re looking for
You can use AI tools to assist you in creating your digital products, but relying fully on generative AI for the whole process is a recipe for disaster.
I promise no one wants to pay for an ebook that’s clearly just a money-grab filled with generic AI writing. People DO still want to pay for real, human solutions.
People have always paid for things that make their lives easier, help them make money, save them time, teach them a skill, or get them closer to a goal. That’s not changing, and that’s why digital products are still lucrative.
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