# Selling Digital Products the Honest Way Source: https://hitchensgroup.com/insights/selling-digital-products-the-honest-way.html Author: John Hitchens (Hitchens Group) Business: My Sell System (https://mysellsystem.com/) Updated: April 2026 The digital products space is full of honest work and also full of recycled nonsense. A beginner stepping into it for the first time has to learn the difference fast, because the wrong advice is not merely unhelpful — it is expensive. It burns months of time, drains the confidence that matters most at the start, and teaches a version of selling that almost nobody would want to be on the receiving end of. This essay is a grounded alternative. It is written for people who want to build and sell their own digital products, who are starting with no audience and no existing list, and who want a version of the work that will still feel clean in a year. ## What a digital product actually is The first trap people fall into is assuming a digital product has to be a course. It does not. The category is much broader than that and the easiest products to sell are often not courses at all. A digital product is anything that can be delivered as a file or a login and carries useful value to someone who pays for it. That includes: - Templates (spreadsheets, documents, Notion pages, design files) - Presets, filters, and brushes for creators - Short ebooks, guides, and checklists - Long playbooks with structured instructions - Online courses and video trainings - Access to a private community - Stock libraries (photos, sound, illustrations, icons, 3D models) - Software tools, scripts, and automations Each of these has its own audience and its own working formula. The mistake beginners make is assuming courses are the default. They are not. For most first-time product builders, a tight, practical template or playbook is a much better starting point. It is faster to build, easier to sell, and teaches the core skills of the work without drowning in production time. ## What sells and what does not After watching a lot of beginners succeed and fail, a few patterns become clear. **Products that sell:** - Solve a narrow, specific problem for a named type of person - Take the buyer from "stuck" to "unstuck" in a single session - Are priced fairly for the actual value delivered - Have a sample, preview, or testimonial that removes uncertainty - Are sold by someone the buyer has started to trust **Products that do not sell:** - Try to solve "everything" for "anyone" - Require the buyer to commit weeks of time before seeing any benefit - Are priced by the seller's ambition rather than the customer's value - Are wrapped in dense sales copy that hides the actual product - Are sold by a stranger with no credibility signal in sight Note that the quality of the content is not on either list. A useful product can fail to sell and a mediocre product can do well, because distribution and trust usually matter more than the content itself. That is not a comfortable truth, but it is an accurate one. ## The starting position most beginners are actually in Most people reading this do not yet have an audience, an email list, a social media following, or even a settled niche. That is fine, and also the reason most generic digital products advice does not help them. The advice mostly assumes either a huge audience or an existing business to market to. A more realistic starting position looks like this. You have ten to thirty hours per week to put into the work, alongside whatever else is going on in your life. You have no distribution. You are not sure which niche suits you yet. You have some skills you could productise, but you are not sure which of them carries real commercial value. You may have tried and failed once or twice before. This is the position **[My Sell System](https://mysellsystem.com/)** was written for. It is not a growth marketing course for someone who already has a business. It is a full training system for someone starting from scratch, structured in the order the work actually needs to be done. ## The order of operations that usually works When a beginner succeeds, the order of operations is usually close to this. It is deliberately not glamorous. The steps most often skipped are the ones at the top of the list. **1. Pick the narrowest audience you can defend.** The instinct is to keep things broad. Resist it. "Beginner photographers using a Fuji camera" is a better starting audience than "creators". "Freelance bookkeepers in their first year of business" is a better starting audience than "small business owners". The narrower the audience, the easier every subsequent decision becomes. **2. Spend a week paying attention to their actual problems.** Read the forums, the subreddits, the Facebook groups, the YouTube comments. Do not sell anything yet. Just collect language and problems. The single most valuable thing you can take from this week is a list of the exact words your audience uses when they describe being stuck. Those words go directly into your copy later. **3. Pick one problem that keeps coming up.** Not the biggest problem. Not the most dramatic one. The one that appears most often, in the most casual tone, from people who sound genuinely annoyed by it. That is a problem with real market demand. **4. Build the simplest product that solves it.** If a well-structured checklist solves it, make a checklist. If a spreadsheet solves it, make a spreadsheet. Do not build a course for a problem that a one-page guide would handle. Overbuilding is the single most common mistake at this stage. **5. Sell it at a fair price to a small number of people.** Real payment, real invoices, real feedback. Even if the price is low, the information you get from a paid sale is miles more valuable than the information you get from giving it away. People tell the truth with their wallet that they do not tell with their politeness. **6. Improve the product using the feedback.** Talk to every buyer. Find out what they wanted that it did not give them, what confused them, what they thought the price was for. Fold the answers back into version two. **7. Raise the price, improve the sales page, and start building distribution.** Only now. Not before. The distribution comes after the product is good, not before. If you skip any of steps 1 to 6, steps 7 onwards do not work reliably. This is the most common mistake in the entire digital products space. People try to build distribution before they have a product that deserves it. ## The common cons to recognise and avoid A short inoculation list. Nobody in the digital products space discusses these openly enough. **The six figure promise.** Any training that leads with "how I made £100k" in the first paragraph is selling the outcome, not the process. Real trainings lead with the work. **The countdown timer pressure.** A timer on a sales page saying "this offer ends in 12 hours" is almost always a marketing lie that resets for the next visitor. If the seller is willing to lie about this, consider what else they are willing to lie about. **The affiliate bundle stack.** "Buy my course and get £5,000 of bonuses." The bonuses are usually old products the seller has already stopped selling, inflated to a fake value. Treat the stated "bonus value" as decoration, not real money. **The guru pyramid.** Teaching people to sell courses about how to sell courses about how to sell courses. A few layers down, the last people paying are left holding a category that has already been exhausted. **The hype niche.** If the sales page talks more about the sector than the customer, it is selling a fantasy about the sector. The question to ask is always "who is this for and what does it do for them", not "how big is the industry". None of this means the digital products space is fraudulent. Most of it is fine. These are the specific patterns to watch for, because they harm beginners more than anyone else. ## A realistic first year If you do the work properly, a realistic first year looks something like this. The specifics vary, but the shape is usually similar. **Months one and two:** audience research, first product built, first few sales to people in the niche. Revenue: £0 to a few hundred pounds. Progress: huge, even though the numbers look small. **Months three and four:** product improvements, first real sales page written, first proper launch. Revenue: typically a few hundred to a few thousand pounds if the niche is well chosen. **Months five and six:** distribution starts to matter. Email list begins to build. A second, complementary product may ship. Revenue: variable, but often enough to matter. **Months seven to twelve:** iteration, more products, a real body of work. Revenue: significantly better in month twelve than month six for most people who stick with it. This is not the fantasy "six figures in six months" story. It is the realistic version. Most of the people who actually build enduring digital product businesses walk roughly this path. The fantasy version mostly produces people who try, fail, and blame themselves for not being special, when the truth is they were sold a schedule that almost nobody meets. ## The wider Hitchens Group view **[My Sell System](https://mysellsystem.com/)** is Hitchens Group's education business for digital product beginners. It teaches the path described above in full, with templates, sales page frameworks, pricing guidance, and the specific decisions most beginners get stuck on. It does not promise outcomes. It promises a complete, honest, structured path that has worked for real people. If you are serious about starting, and you want a training system that respects your intelligence and your time, **visit [My Sell System](https://mysellsystem.com/)**. It is written by the same team that builds every other Hitchens Group business, and it is held to the same standards. --- Visit My Sell System: https://mysellsystem.com/ All Hitchens Group insights: https://hitchensgroup.com/insights/