How To Make Money Selling Digital Products (Step-by-Step Tutorial)

Digital products, the best thing you can sell, period.

In this video, I'm going to show you exactly how to make money selling your own digital products.

I've spent years learning and building my own digital products business, making hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And I'll show you everything I know.

This will be a step-by-step tutorial covering everything you need and will break it down by chapters.

This is the only video you'll ever need, and by the end, you'll have a blueprint.

We'll cover what digital products are.

Profitable niches and types.

How to create them easily using AI.

The best tools to use, placing them for sale on your website.

How to actually get sales and more.

This video will teach you more in about 25 minutes than most paid courses out there, and it's completely free.

This is the most up-to-date video about digital products on YouTube.

And yeah, let's get started. So, the first thing that we should talk about is what actually is a digital product?

Well, a digital product is essentially a product you can sell, but instead of it being a physical product like this phone or this drink right here, it's something that exists and is delivered electronically.

So instead of having to, you know, actually build a product like this, you can sell something that costs almost nothing for fulfillment, and that's going to be things like PDFs, courses, memberships, digital planners, templates, e-books, and so on.

Now, the great thing is that literally anyone can create a digital product, it costs almost nothing to start.

That's really why it is one of the best things you can actually start selling in 2025 and beyond, it's sort of what they mean when people say making money online is on easy mode right now, and it is because of digital products.

So we sort of talked about the difference between physical and digital products, but let's really compare them.

First is the cost to build, the cost to build a digital product is almost nothing, you can use software like Canva, Kittle, Typeset to make you really great looking PDFs and things, and those are basically free to maybe $20, $30 a month.

On the other hand, physical products, this can take literally thousands of dollars to build your first product, and the risk is a lot higher because you don't know if it's going to sell, and if you order a lot of a product and it doesn't sell, well, you're going to lose money.

The other main difference is the cost to fulfill, so obviously with digital products, all you sort of need to do is email them the access code or the PDF file or the PNG file, whatever it is, and so fulfillment is essentially zero.

Whereas, of course, with physical products, you need to actually ship it out, you need to handle all the logistics for, you know, UPS, FedEx, whatever it is, and those are just two reasons why digital products in my opinion are so much better for beginners to sell.

Complex fulfillment kills so many new physical product businesses that for me, I just don't think it's worth it for most people to try to do that, if anything, just start with digital products so you can learn how everything works and then migrate over to physical products if you really want to do that later on.

So for me, I've sold multiple courses, I have a bunch of free courses as well, I also create a ton of PDFs and templates that I give out for free right now, but if I wanted to, I could probably sell them.

For you guys watching this, there is literally an unlimited amount of things you can do with digital products, so just really want to emphasize how insane this type of business model can be.

There are tons and tons of people making hundreds of thousands of dollars per month doing just this.

It's now to brainstorm some of the different things that you guys can sell.

Essentially, it comes down to selling some type of knowledge, and the great thing is that knowledge is everywhere these days.

You might be thinking, okay, I can sell something, but what if people can go out there and get it for free? Well, yeah, all the information in the world is on the web for free.

The thing is, if you package it differently and have an audience that you can actually sell to, then this can be a recipe for success.

And you also might be wondering, okay, I don't currently have an audience, how am I going to actually get sales for my product? We'll talk about this in depth later on, but it is completely doable, you do not need a big audience, instead, you can actually have zero audience, you can just simply run ads, but for most people, I think building a small audience is the way to go, but yeah, we'll talk more about that later on in this video.

So, in terms of PDFs, there are so many things you can sell, you can sell guides on certain industries, niches, whatever it is, literally take the words how to and then end that sentence with something, and that can be a PDF.

There's also courses, of course, so you can literally teach the world any type of thing, for example, I had a YouTube course teaching people how to start a YouTube channel, it's very, very likely that you have a skill that you think a lot of people might know, but actually they don't.

And a lot of people are willing to pay for a place to have all this information, that's why having a course can be such a great thing.

The types of courses you can create are infinite, so I just encourage you to take out a piece of paper, write some ideas down on things that you like or you are good at, and see if you can turn that into some type of course.

Digital planners and templates are another great thing you can create that are pretty easy to make, but can actually offer a lot of value to the person that buys it.

For example, some type of daily accountability template, you could sell this to people, it can help them be a lot more productive in their life, and if you sell this at, let's say, $10 each to 1,000 people, that's already $10,000 of almost pure profit.

You can also have a membership site, so this is going to be some type of community that can be paid or free, you can have a free community and then just sell your audience inside that community, that's what a lot of people do, or you can have some sort of monthly access fee to join that community.

We sort of mentioned templates already, but something like a budgeting template, that's a really easy one for the finance sector, and yeah, if you guys just look up what are the best digital products to sell, it's going to give you a huge list.

We'll put some on the screen right now just so you guys can see, but it really is unlimited, right? You also have e-books, so you can actually write an entire e-book, you can use ChatGPT to help you write this book, and you can sell that as a PDF file.

I will say though, it is very important that you guys stick to one particular niche, don't try to create a business selling all types of digital products, especially if they're in different types of industries, that's not going to work, and so I definitely want to emphasize that point, stick to one niche.

So, once you have an idea in mind for what type of digital product you want to sell, let's start by building your website, because you're going to need a place to actually sell it.

Now, there are tons and tons of choices out there, I've used pretty much every single platform that there is, but I think the most affordable and easiest one to actually get started with is going to be making a website using Hostinger.

They have an AI website builder that allows you to build a website in just minutes, it looks fantastic, super professional, and it costs like three or four dollars per month if you guys use my link down below.

In just a second, I'll show you exactly how to build this website and then how to actually list your product for sale.

There are other ways of building an online store like with Shopify, but those cost like $30, $40 per month, and so yeah, if you want to save some money, I think Hostinger is the way to do it.

So, if you click on the link down below, it's going to take you to this exact landing page, this is where you're going to get the best deal on Hostinger available, and I'll also show you how to use code CHARLIECHANG to get an additional 10% off at checkout.

So, what we're going to do is come here and click start now.

And they have three different plans, the premium, the business, and the cloud startup, for all you guys, I think the business plan is going to be the best for this particular use.

The reason is because it gives you e-commerce functionality, so we're actually going to build a store, and also one single plan allows you to build up to 100 different websites, so you can build literally as many websites as you want, and also yeah, I personally use Hostinger for all of my websites, and I just love them, so I am absolutely happy recommending them, you also get a free domain, which is really nice, you do need to have that, so yeah, I'm going to click on choose plan for business.

You're going to select how many months you want for this plan, definitely do not do one because that's super, super expensive, doesn't make any sense, do at least 12, and I actually recommend logging in this price for at least 24 months because it does jump up after that, so I'm going to go ahead and select that.

See, it's about $4 per month, which is amazing, and then what you're going to do is come here to have a coupon code, and you'll enter in CHARLIECHANG, that's just my name, click apply, and it's going to save you even more money.

Now we'll click on continue here, it's going to have you create an account and then finish the checkout process.

Now, once you get that set up, you're going to go to your Hostinger dashboard, and that's where we're going to use AI to create our website for us.

You have the option of going through this and clicking and create a website, you essentially just need to put your brand name and your description, or you can also use their pre-made templates.

Now I'm going to show you how to do this using AI because we do want to save some time, so there you have it, Charlie Creator Consulting, I help creators monetize their following, I sell digital products that teach people how to monetize their audiences, it's automatically going to suggest an online store, so we're going to leave this selected, that way we can actually sell our products, and we'll click on create a website.

Cool, so now it's created a first draft of our website, basically what you can do is change the color palette right here.

You can look through this, if you want to redo it and have it created again, you can always click on this right here, but I think this looks good, I'm just going to go ahead and click continue.

Once you do that, you'll see here we can set up our store to actually input our products that we're going to sell, we'll do that later after I show you how to make a digital product.

But at any time, we can come here to edit website, and this is basically going to take us to the Hostinger website builder.

This is a very easy way to actually edit and build your website, so essentially, everything that you want to change, you can just double click on it, so for example, if I want to change this text, I can very easily do that, I can change this text as well, you can use the AI writer to help us write different things to save us some time, we can also change the formatting of this text, we can change the button by clicking edit button.

We can change all these general things, we can change the style, and also add an animation if we want, this picture right here for the hero banner, we can definitely change this, so click edit section, we can replace this image, you can even use AI to help you create images or upload your own, Hostinger also has a ton of free images you can use as well, just for now, I'm going to leave this as is because I don't want to waste too much time on this.

But yeah, essentially, go through this, look at the different sections, if there's any section you don't want, you can always click on this trash can button right here and it's going to delete it, if I want to undo that, I'll just use Apple Z or control Z to undo it, we can move sections around as well by using this or this, we can duplicate them, we can generate different images, of course.

And we can also add sections too, so let's say we want to add a section, let's say we want an about me section, so I'll come here to about, they have all these professionally made templates, let's go ahead and do something like this one, so I'll click on this, it's going to insert that here, and of course, we will change up the text with our own text.

You can see that they pre-populated this page with client feedback, which is definitely good to have, yeah, super, super cool, you can see it saves you so much time, I don't think it makes any sense to not build a website without AI.

And then once you are ready, you're going to connect your domain, so that's going to be that free domain that you get by setting up for a plan, and then clicking go live, once you click on that, your website is going to be live for other people to go to, and now you can, you know, sell it to people.

You can see on the left here, there are tons and tons of AI tools, so we can use these tools to write a bunch of the copy that is on our website.

If you want to manage your different pages, you'll come here and click on this button, this is going to be your main navigation, which shows up over here, we can create new pages if we want, we can delete existing pages, and then if you want to customize your store, you'll click on this button right here, and we can basically go through these steps, but I'll do that in just a second.

Now, of course, when it comes to selling digital products, your website is important, how you sell is important, but of course, we need a digital product to sell, so I'm going to show you really quickly how you can start building your digital product really easily, I'll show you a couple different ways to do it.

So, first is going to be with Canva, you've definitely have heard of Canva, it's a free to use website that you can use to design any type of PDFs or documents, they do have paid plans as well, which get you more premium features, but it is not necessary.

For example, this is a PDF that we made for one of our businesses, it's about 23 pages, and with Canva, it's it's super, super easy, it's basically drag and drop, and so with any text, you can easily edit this, create new text, if I want to add more text here, I'll just come here to text, click add a text box, you can write test text right here.

If you want to drag it around, we can easily do that, and then if you want to delete it, you can click on this trash can button, we can also insert any elements too, so this is a really powerful part of Canva, you can search for different things, so let's say we want to put in a box, you have all these things right here, anytime you see this thing, it means you need a pro plan to use it, so just FYI, but any shape, let's say I want to put this in here, I'm just going to drag it here, and bam, I can change the dimensions, I can write text inside of it, and yeah, that's basically Canva.

You can also insert graphics, you can insert different frames, different photos, different videos, we can also upload our own stuff directly to Canva and insert that in here, so let's say I want to put in this LinkedIn logo, I can do that, resize it and put it right here, so yeah, if you're making PDFs, this is a great way to do it.

Another alternative is Kittle.ai, that's more of like a AI backed PDF and graphics designer, I've used it as well, it's really, really good, but it does cost some money.

And the most important thing is that you actually give value to your audience within your digital product.

Right, if you are charging some amount of money, no matter how much it is, you do want to give some type of value, and like I said earlier, a lot of this information, it's going to be able to be found online for free somewhere, but what you're doing is, you're compiling it all in one spot, you're putting some trust behind it because it's a paid product, so just keep that in mind when you are building out your digital product.

This might seem really complex at first or really long, but you don't need to make a PDF that is this long at first, it can be a lot more simple, it can simply be a template, it can be a planner, it can be something that is not as, you know, information rich, but only you know what's best for you and your audience, so just do some brainstorming before you actually start creating it.

Once you're done creating it, what you're going to do is click on share right here, we're going to click download, and then we're going to basically export it as whatever is the best, so likely if you're doing a PDF, it's going to be PDF print, you'll select how you want all this stuff, which pages to actually render out, and then you'll click on download, let's go ahead and do that here and click download, and once that's done, it's going to download directly to the computer.

Now, if you're making an e-book, a really great way to do that is with Typeset, I'll have a link down below to Typeset as well, this does cost money, but it can save you a ton of time, especially if you're making a ton of presentations or e-books.

Because essentially, what you do is you are going to paste a bunch of text into this section right here, and it's going to use AI to build this for us, so as you can see that literally took like two seconds, this is actually a pretty solid looking e-book, at least the foundations of it, and then what we can do is basically add in different photos, we can change the formatting too if we want, but I think this looks great, and yeah, that literally took me like two seconds.

Anytime you want to insert media, for example, on this page right here, we can click on this button, we can drag and drop different images, we can search for something, so let's say partnership, click on search, these are all going to be free photos that we can use on Unsplash, all right, these might not be the best images, but let's go ahead and just select something like this, click add one image, and it's going to, you know, use AI to put it in, we can always change how it looks here, but I think that looks fine, and once you are done with this, you're basically going to come here, we'll click on preview, so I'm going to look through this, looks pretty good.

And now we'll click on export right here, we'll select PDF, portrait, okay, good, and click export selected.

As you know, this is a very small subset of the types of products we can make, it goes well beyond just making PDFs, there are so many other types of digital products, but I just wanted to show you guys really quickly how easy it is to make, especially with all these AI tools these days, it is just absolutely amazing.

So now we're going to go back to our website, I'm going to show you how to add this PDF we just made to our website, this way we can start selling it right away.

So, going back to the website builder, we're going to manage our store, that's this button right here, and I basically just recommend going through this checklist, so we'll click on add a product, we're going to select digital product since that's what we are selling.

Now, the first section is going to be media, this is going to be what's shown on the actual page, so I've gone ahead and screenshotted our cover page, so I'm going to, you know, open that here, it's basically going to be like a little preview of our PDF.

Next, we're going to name it, so we're going to say SEO content strategy playbook, we can have a description here, I'm just going to use the AI writer real quick, SEO content strategy playbook, okay, click generate text.

That looks okay for now, we're going to select the pricing, so let's say we want to sell it for $10, you can also select free here if you want to do that.

There's a lot of options we can have, we can add additional info sections, I'm just going to leave those blank for now, let's go ahead and select this for categories, and here is where we're going to actually upload the file, so we'll go ahead and click on this, we'll go to our actual PDF, and it says customers will receive an email with a link to download this digital product, you can have this link available for X hours, X days, let's set it at seven days for now, and once that's uploaded, we'll click on save right here.

And sweet, our new product has been added to our catalog of products, as you can see, they pre-populated with a bunch of other ones, just based on what we wrote, at any time, you can always come here and click delete, go ahead and do that for one of them.

If we go back to store setup, we want to set up a payment method, so what you'll probably want to do is set up PayPal or Stripe, these are probably the most common ones, I'd probably recommend using Stripe, and this might look a little bit different depending on what country you are in, but yeah, Stripe allows you to accept credit card payments, so you can basically click on connect, set up your account and do all that.

You'll also want to update your company information, and then you also want to review your shipping options, although for digital products, that's not really going to be too applicable, so don't worry too much about that, just know that if you do want to sell physical products at some point, you can absolutely do that using Hostinger.

There's a lot of other features too, for example, you can set discounts, we can basically create discount codes that we can give to people, you can also book appointments directly through this Hostinger website, for example, if you're doing one hour consulting sessions, you can absolutely sell that here, and yeah, that's essentially how you build your store to sell your products.

Now, as you can see, if we go to our website, we'll click on shop, we will see the different products, we'll click on the one that we just uploaded, and then people can come here, click add to bag, and then they can go ahead and go through the checkout process, and yeah, that's basically how you can sell the product on your website, great thing is that there's no shipping or anything like that after, it's just an automated email, super, super amazing.

So now let's talk a little bit about how you can actually get sales for your digital products.

I've showed you how to create your digital product and how to also create your website, but I haven't showed you really how to get traffic to your website so that you can actually start seeing some sales.

Now, the first thing that I will say is that you do not need a big audience, this is a huge misconception that most people have.

They think you need millions and millions of views to make sales, but the truth is you do not.

All you need is high intent traffic, and the way that we actually get high intent traffic is pretty simple, we're going to basically do this on a bunch of different platforms, so you're going to use Pinterest, you're going to use YouTube, you're going to use Instagram, and you're going to use TikTok.

Basically, the best way to do it is to create pretty simple short-form content that offers value to your audience, and that's going to build up a lot of trust.

And once you can build trust, then you can have your website in your profile, they can go to that website and they can actually buy your product.

The great thing about this and the real beauty of it is that the people that are seeing your content, they are super, super interested in whatever niche you are teaching.

So, for example, if you are in the finance niche, right, and you make a lot of short-form content teaching people, you know, these are stocks that I'm buying, this is how you invest in a Roth IRA, this is how you create a 401k, whatever it is.

Those types of people that actually follow you and and consume your content, they are super, super primed and they also have that interest, they want to learn finance, and so when you create your own digital product that relate to that niche, it is an absolute rockstar pairing.

Within your content, you can do call to actions saying, hey, if you want to learn more about this particular thing, I have this product, check it out, it's at my store, link in my bio.

Also, a really great thing about this is that you can create your video once, and then post it on all of these platforms.

That's how you become omnipresent, you really want to maximize the reach and be as efficient as possible.

So, create one piece of content, repurpose it over all these different platforms, and that's going to maximize the amount of views you can get.

I'm going to show you an example of a couple creators that are absolutely crushing it doing this exact content strategy, so the first one is Mino Lee, if you look at his reels, you can see they perform really well, and basically his niche is teaching people how to make content, so he does a lot of content just like this, and if we look at his actual bio, we can see he has his content academy linked in his profile, so if you click on that, this takes you to his website where he's selling his community and course.

Another person that's absolutely crushing it is Nana, so basically, if you go to her Instagram, you can see a lot of her reels are also teaching people how to create content, so stuff like this, and you can see she has a very distinct short-form video style, and if you go to her bio, you can see she's using Stan Store, which is also great, and she has all of her digital products listed here.

You can also see something similar on my own Instagram, so I do a ton of content, and then on my profile, if you go to the links, you can see I have a resources page, this is built and hosted in Hostinger, so you can build something like this as well, and it has a bunch of different links that, you know, some of them are digital products, some of them are links to affiliates, but that's basically my short-form strategy.

As you create more and more content that is in your niche, you're going to start building an audience, and this really does take a ton of consistency.

It is not a fast game, you guys, you cannot expect to all of a sudden just post and get tons and tons of new followers and views, unfortunately, that's just not how it works, it just takes a lot of consistency over a good amount of time.

Here's another fantastic page, they basically teach you how to use Notion to be super organized, so all their content is, you know, how to content about Notion, and if you click on their link here, it takes you to their website where they sell their templates and their digital products, so I'm pretty sure this business is absolutely crushing it, and you can see you can get very, very specific, this is Notion, so it's a very specific software platform website that people use, and there's so many people just absolutely crushing it with Notion templates right now.

So I just wanted to show you guys some examples of what other people are doing, and you can see it's basically follows this formula, create content on these platforms, giving value to your audience, and making sure you only give value to a particular subset of people, and then having a digital product that you can sell to them, that is the winning formula.

If you do not want to be on video, that's totally okay, you can do this exact content strategy without showing your face, you can literally just show your screen or whatever doing something, giving some type of value in your niche, and you don't need to have a face.

If you really don't want to do social media, that's also okay, although it's going to make it a lot more challenging, just to be honest, but you can just create a website, so you can create a website just using Hostinger, instead of making short-form videos, you can do articles there teaching people things, that's just another way to give value to your audience and having some type of related digital product to sell them.

Now, this strategy, just having a website, of course, is not as good as doing social media because it's a lot harder for you to get your website out there without social media, so I'd say if you can, that's what I would do, I would do social media, I would make videos, I would post different pins on Pinterest because that's also another platform that, you know, not that many people use right now, so there's not that much competition out there, pretty simple overall strategy, the concept is not too hard to grasp as you saw, but the hard part is just being consistent with it and doing it for a while.

Again, I do want to say, although digital products are probably the best thing you can sell right now, it still is a business, and it does take some time and consistency for you to see results, so if you want to start this, don't get flustered if you aren't making sales right away, that's completely normal, and actually, your first few products, they might not do that well, that's totally okay.

As an entrepreneur, I have failed so many businesses, I have failed so many different projects, and it's just normal, it's part of the game, the best thing though is that you guys are watching this video, you're here to learn, and you're going to take these lessons, you're going to build your product, you're going to sell it.

And so, even if you fail, it is fine, you can just create a new digital product, try a new way of marketing it, try a new content strategy, whatever it is.

Just keep doing this until one of them hits, I guarantee you, if you do this consistently for a long time, something will hit, yeah, just want to emphasize again, I think digital products are amazing.

They are one of the best businesses that you can possibly start in 2025 and beyond, and this is the exact strategy that I would take if I were to build another digital product right now.

Hopefully, you got some value from this video.

I know we covered a lot of different things, so if you want to rewatch it, that's totally cool, maybe take out a notebook, take some notes.

But the most important thing, you guys, is just taking action.

I really encourage you, go build your website, start building your digital product, figure out what type of niche you want to get into and where you can offer value to people, and yeah, just follow the pretty simple blueprint that we talked about in this video, I'm positive that hundreds or even thousands of you watching this video will be able to create a successful digital product and sell it.

If you got any value from this video, make sure to hit that like button and also subscribe for more content just like this.

I do a ton of content about entrepreneurship, investing, finances, all stuff to help you live a more financially successful life.

Anyway, thank you so much for your time again, and I'll see you in the next video.

Peace.