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If you wish to offer products that don’t require shipping or physical storage, digital products are an ideal solution for services made, shared, and used online. They can be instantly accessed or downloaded for free or monetized with a paywall, shop page, or subscription.
Digital products you can create on Squarespace include online courses, Member Sites, video pages, and scheduled workshops or appointments. There’s a multitude of digital products that you can offer customers, like online educational courses and how-tos with Course pages, membership access to a range of visual and written content with Member Sites, or video pages offering on-demand video access on a variety of topics.
Sell digital products on Squarespace in 6 steps
1. Choose your niche and product(s)
Selecting the digital products you want to sell involves a blend of business insight and creativity. Consider what your skills and expertise are and what you might enjoy sharing with others.
Doing market research prior to choosing products will help you isolate a niche and format that fits your skills and find your unique selling point. For example, if you make design templates, you might decide to start teaching an online course on how to create or customize templates if you enjoy teaching others about your process. If you’d rather focus on your design work, you can simply sell the templates as a downloadable product or on a subscription basis.
No matter what type of product you want to sell, understanding your audience and demand is important. Gain insights into the preferences, needs, and buying habits of your target market.While your vision is crucial, it's equally important to consider your audience and practical factors like trends in digital content, seasonality, and your profit margins.
Get ideas for selling digital products
2. Create a website or landing page
Create a professional website with essential information about your digital product and its benefits, pricing, and your contact details. Make your products easy to find and understand and ensure that your site is mobile-friendly. This will often be the first touchpoint that customers will have with your business, so having it be an accurate reflection of your brand and what you offer is vital.
Squarespace makes it easy to get started with digital products by providing access to everything you need to start selling your products online.
3. Add your products
Depending on the digital product that you’re going to sell, there are ways to add digital products to your website. Once you add a store page to your website, you’ll have a selection of different product types available to you.
Course pages: Provide access to an online course with multiple lessons to educate customers on something you have expertise in, like branding or nutrition.
Member Sites: Monetize access to your visual, written, audio, and/or video content—like art, recipes, podcasts, or bonus videos—while creating a place for community building around a shared interest.
Downloadable products: Some digital products are delivered via email once customers pay. These are ideal for selling music files, ebooks, imagery, recipes, and documents like workbooks or guides.
Services: A non-physical product based on a service that you offer. These can range from IT consultancy and event planning to health and wellness coaching, therapy, and holistic services. You can use Acuity Scheduling to offer booking for these services and manage appointments and payments.
Video pages: Create a browsable library of videos and add a pricing plan to put it behind a paywall. Set up access for free, a one-time fee, or on a subscription basis.
Each of these product types will fulfill a particular function based on what you wish to sell. Your chosen niche, your interests, and what you can commit to creating will reflect the type of digital product that you’ll sell.
For example, Member Sites and selling services require a bigger time and resource commitment to maintain. If you want to create something more passive, another type of product might make more sense.
4. Make the value clear
Presenting your product as a solution can be a very effective way to indicate the value that you’re offering your customers. This starts by understanding what your customer needs and what isn’t being currently offered to them. Finding ways to distinguish yourself from your competition will help you stand out with the digital products you’re providing.
High quality imagery: Clear and sharp visuals create a positive first impression, grab visitors' attention, and help people understand what you’re selling. This provides a look and feel that'll improve the user experience and affect how people interpret your brand. Knowing how to take good images, not only for your site but the products you’re offering, will help you stand out.
Reviews and testimonials: Sharing what customers have to say about your products is one of the best ways to provide trustworthy social proof for their quality and accuracy. Squarespace has a useful product review feature that can display the reviews for download products. Or you can use a quote block to show off testimonials.
Clear product descriptions: Offer detailed and clear product descriptions, emphasizing essential features, advantages, and specifications. This helps customers make well-informed decisions about the products you’re offering.
Discounts: Gifting discounts to customers is a great way to not only promote your products, but it can help with building loyalty via the generosity that you’re offering to the customer. This helps differentiate your brand, enhances the overall satisfaction for the customer and can lead to word-of-mouth referrals.
5. Get traffic to your page
It's important to create an appealing website with attractive images, a clean design, and clear writing. However, having a well designed website alone won't bring in visitors. To attract more people, Squarespace provides a range of helpful SEO tools that you can use to actively work to improve your website's visibility in search engines, bring in new viewers, and build a loyal audience for your products.
Some important steps to take when setting up your website for SEO content are:
Connect with Google Search Console: Verifying your site with Google Search Console allows Google to index your site, which can help your changes show up faster in search. Plus, you can see which keywords visitors are searching to find your site.
Include keywords and website descriptions: Doing keyword analysis will help you find out what people are searching to find content similar to yours. Well-optimized website content that includes those relevant keywords can help potential customers find your site through search.
Make it mobile-friendly: Websites optimized for mobile devices enhance the user experience for visitors accessing your site on their mobile devices. This positive user experience results in reduced bounce rates, extended visit durations, and heightened engagement. All of these responses signal to search engines that your site is satisfying a searcher’s needs.
Try link building: This is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. These links, also known as backlinks, help in a variety of ways. Search engines view them as a vote of confidence from one site to another and they can enhance your site's authority and credibility. Start by linking your site in your social media or explore collaborations with peers that would encourage links back to your site.
Get more SEO tips for your site
6. Promote and grow your sales
Strategic marketing initiatives are key to reaching a wider audience and converting your site visitors into customers. Promoting the benefits of your digital products and why they’re different is a good starting point. Some factors to consider when promoting your site are:
Using social media: Consider linking social media accounts to your website. You can start by sharing updates on your latest projects, your process, and what products you’re offering. If you already have accounts or a following, explore adding platforms that complement your content. Opt for visual platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, or Pinterest, or choose text-focused platforms like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and LinkedIn, depending on what best suits your content.
Email marketing: Begin by creating an email list. Integrate an easy-to-find sign-up box into your website, allowing visitors to join your mailing list. Consider providing complimentary incentives, such as guides or exclusive content, to entice subscribers. All of this can be managed with Squarespace’s Email Campaigns.
Paid advertising: If you have the available funds, paid ads are a simple digital marketing tactic to get more eyes on your website. Before you begin, establish a budget. Consider the primary online spaces frequented by your target audience to prioritize the most effective advertising platforms. Think about elements that would motivate viewers to click through to your website when designing your ads. Initiating small tests can be beneficial in determining the optimal areas for your investment.
How to sell members-only content
Choosing to sell digital products through Member Sites is a fantastic way to offer value and a sense of community to your customers. Member Sites is a multi-functional feature that enables you to sell membership access to a variety of content. You can add different categories of content within a Member Site, such as classes, workshops, or video libraries, and you can add your own personal touch to how the content is presented. To set up a Member Site:
Create a Member Site from within the Pages panel of your site editor.
Add page/s to the Member Site.
Create a pricing plan. This is what monetizes access to the Member Site.
Create a page or add a sign-up option to an existing page. You can add digital product blocks to the page to create a paywall. These are then directly linked to the Member Site you created.
With Member Sites, you can form an online community and display content that your community will love. The content you add to a Member Site is automatically kept behind a paywall, accessible only to members who sign up for a pricing plan. You have the flexibility to provide both free and paid memberships for your Member Site.
Music content
If you’d like to sell your music or audio content on your website, you can add audio blocks to a page within your Member Site and have the music either be playable directly or offer the ability to download the music from the block. You can also share and manage podcasts using Audio blocks within a blog page.
If you sell downloadable audio products in your online store, you can still put exclusive audio on your Member Site for subscribers.
Written & static content
Sharing static content within your Member Site is also a common way to offer value to your customers. You can provide anything from PDF guides or recipes to printable art, ebooks, and photography. This process involves uploading the files to pages within the Member Site.
You can style these as text links on your Member Site or as image click-through downloads. For example, if you create cooking content, you could share a photo of a set of recipes that links to a PDF download of those meals. Or you could share a preview of your latest ebook and create a text link or button to lead members to download.
How to sell video content
One of the core digital product offerings on Squarespace is selling video access to your customers. With paywalls and specialized page layouts, you can offer access to videos on your website, instead of making the large files downloadable.
To create a paywalled section for monetized videos, use a video page. These collections could include stock videos, video templates, short film projects, workouts, or tutorials.
Online course pages
If your goal is to earn money with an online course, you can create Courses to share what you know through organized lessons. Teach what you know, like social media marketing strategies, hair cutting techniques for salons, or beginner graphic design techniques.
Course pages are straightforward to set up once your content is ready to upload. After you’ve added a Course page to your website, you can put it behind a paywall and ask visitors to sign up to view your content. A Course page can be a standalone page that’s monetized or added into a Member Site..
Acuity Scheduling
If you want to offer workshops or sell access to live-stream video or video meetings, a great way to offer this is to sell tickets to a future event. Acuity Scheduling allows you to offer individual appointments for one-on-one meetings, but it also gives you the option to organize a group event with participants signing up directly through your website.
To implement this, establish a "Group Class" using the Scheduling add-on for your website. Define the event specifics and pricing, and then integrate the sign-up form seamlessly anywhere on your website for convenient registrations.
If you intend to host frequent events, consider incorporating an events page into your website. Much like a blog page or a store page, an events page acts as a repository for your events, maintaining a chronological order for easy organization.