If You're Curious About Selling Digital Products, Consider Checking Out This Easy and Affordable Shopping Cart System (Payhip)

If you've got a good idea, and it's specific enough to solve a problem, you have a business opportunity.

My first book, Path of the Freelancer, is the blueprint I use to work part-time and earn six figures. It's a broad solution to a problem I was facing.

Out of all the insights from the book, it's the chapter on building a steady stream of paying clients that gets the most attention. That's a more specific problem. It's the problem most freelancers want to talk to me about.

As a freelancer who works with companies to help them get their content ranked on Google, I've discovered there is one simple task that makes the biggest difference when doing SEO. It's updating the title tag on a page a certain way. That's a very specific problem.

And that very specific problem is the product creation opportunity of the current moment (for you and me). When you create a digital product, you can sell digital products and make money while you sleep. Right now, I'm using Payhip to help me run the checkout selling process (but more on that in a minute).

Why I Stopped Relying on Marketplaces

When I first started dabbling with online courses, I launched them on Skillshare. It was a helpful experiment. I earned a few hundred dollars. I proved (to myself more than anyone else) that I could ship a course and earn money from it.

But eventually, Skillshare raised its performance requirements. My programs didn’t have enough students to reach the new thresholds, and my courses were archived.

Students were watching my program, but now it was shut down! Where do I put the program now? That was the moment the lesson landed: If I’m going to build a body of work—books, courses, frameworks, systems—then I need a way to sell it that isn’t dependent on an algorithm, a marketplace, or someone else’s priorities.

I wanted a dependable way to:

• keep offering my existing courses
• sell digital copies of my books outside of Amazon (because Amazon takes a big cut)
• build something that grows with me as I get more serious about monetizing my content creation

With clients, I’ve used (and seen them use) a range of tools: Gumroad, Shopify, Samcart, and plenty of other shopping cart systems.

But Payhip stood out for two reasons that matter a lot more than they sound like they should:

1. It’s easy to use. When you’re trying to ship consistently, ease matters.
2. The pricing model makes sense. You can start by paying a percentage of sales, and as you grow, you can switch to a flat monthly fee—so you’re not paying an arm and a leg before you’ve earned anything.

That combination made it an easy place to start—and a platform I can stick with. I've since referred it to others as a great, simple system for packaging and selling digital programs.

When it comes to selling books, a friend of mine launched her book, excluding Amazon. She created an exclusive window to buy the book directly, outside of Amazon. And that's likely something I'll test out with my next book.

A Step-By-Step Launch Process For Digital Products

If creating and selling a product feels overwhelming for you, let me give you a simple breakdown of the process so you can take that next step of exploring your next mini business opportunity. Let this get your ideas flowing.

Step 1: Choose Something You Can Sell Directly

When I say digital products, I’m usually talking about:

• Books (especially if you already have an Amazon version and want a direct-to-audience option)
• Courses (especially if you’ve been burned by marketplace dependency)
• Digital downloads that support your audience (templates, guides, checklists)

For me, Payhip became the place where I could sell both online courses and digital products in one system.

Now, before you consider building out a big course, the trend in the marketplace is shifting, so I'd highly recommend you shift to creating a mini-course instead. That's why I gave those examples above, getting more and more specific. Find a very specific problem and solve it as quickly and effectively as possible for the student.

My most recent creation on Payhip was The Most Effective SEO Task. It's a simple, focused mini course that it is highly actionable. I want someone to start doing the action immediately, so I designed it that way. When you create an article, do this one SEO task. When you revisit that article 3 months later, do this other task.

Because the program is specific and focused, someone who wants to make an immediate impact can do it within minutes of signing up for my mini-course.

Step 2: Start with Value—Not Tech

Before we touch software, we want to establish clarity.

1. Discover the value.
2. Write about it.

That sounds almost too basic, but it forces the most important work to happen first.

For a digital product, what makes it valuable comes down to some basic questions.

• What problem does this solve?
• Who is it for?
• What’s the outcome someone gets after they use it?
• Why is it worth paying for now?

If I can’t answer those questions simply, the rest of the launch gets harder. A good product is easy to sell. A good product sells when it's hard to buy.

Regarding my SEO course, clients pay me thousands of dollars to do the SEO task I'm teaching. Those who have a library of blog posts can now learn how to do that task themselves for a few bucks.

Step 3: Build a Landing Page

You want one place you can send people to learn about your product. Create a landing page on your website to create this spot. You can use my landing page framework here to structure it and make sure you've done everything needed to make it work for you.

If you don't have a website, Payhip lets you make landing pages on their platform, so that removes a barrier, if that is what's stopping you. The landing page links to the Payhip checkout page, and they take care of the rest.

People buy, and you get deposits from Payhip into your account.

Easy. Simple.

Let's talk more about that. 

Step 4: Use Payhip as the Place You Sell (Checkout + Delivery)

Once you know what you’re selling, you need a dependable way actually to sell it. The most critical element is ensuring a seamless and reliable path from interest to purchase.

If selling your product feels complicated, you won’t promote it consistently. That's part of why creating the landing page is great. It's one place to send people.

Linking that landing page to Payhip also simplifies the selling process.

For example, I have Path of the Freelancer available for $8.99 on Payhip (instead of $9.99 on Amazon), and I’ve made sales that way. Some people prefer to buy directly. Others don't want to buy from Amazon. Payhip now allows me to provide both options.

Note: One nice feature of Payhip is that you can work with friends and partners to help promote your products. Run a collaborative promo for your book like I did with my friend—Payhip tracked his sales so I could compensate him for helping me sell copies to freelancers.

When you're ready to sell digital products, Payhip is an easy and reasonably priced way to make it happen.

Step 5: Promote Like a Human

I’m not interested in hype. I’m interested in consistency. For me, this process of promotion is about creating products that will stand the test of time and then continually promoting them in my content and emails.

It's always a delight to see an email when someone has purchased from my store. These sales are an important part of my journey towards building a content creation business that earns $100k per year.

If you want to get more tactical, you can run small experiments and then double down on what works. One thing I'm testing out is creating YouTube videos to talk about different topics while also highlighting my related products. It becomes a win-win for helping me get monetized on YouTube and sell my products.

If you have something awesome, you'll want to share it with others. You'll want to make it even better. And others will want to tell everyone they know about that awesome product.

Step 6: You Don't Have To Be Perfect. Just Keep Making Things Better.

I treat each product like a living asset. Once it’s selling (even a little), then I improve:

• the landing page
• the product description
• the product itself

The goal isn’t perfection.

It’s forward motion.

For the Most Effective SEO Task, I've recently rebuilt the curriculum to be better. I've included AI prompts to make it more valuable. I started with a simple blog post as the landing page, and then I did an upgrade to make it better. Next, I plan to record a handful of videos to add to the program to make it easier to digest and act.

Selling Digital Products

Payhip has made it easier for me to sell digital products, when I didn't have a way to do that before, and I was in a bind (needing a place to put my courses). When it comes to selling my mini-course and books directly, it's my go-to option.

If you want a simple way to sell your books, courses, and digital downloads—without building a complicated tech stack—Payhip is worth exploring.

If you have a question, feel free to drop into the Share Life Academy and ask me or others in the group who use it.