Making money selling digital goods online.  It is an idea that has you excited, but also overwhelmed when you start to consider the options.  If the work necessary to create an ecommerce website to sell your digital goods has you putting the idea on the back burner, you need to read this!  You may just be surprised how easy it is, and how inexpensive it is to get started.  Selling digital downloads is one of the fastest growing and profitable online sales markets.  Dietitians are prime to capitalize on this business opportunity both to grow their business and ensure that quality, nutrition information is available.

Selling Digital Products Online

There are an overwhelming array of options for selling digital downloads including subscription sites like eJunkie, SendOwl and Gumroad.  These sites take care of the shopping cart, hosting of files and provide an easy way to sell a few items.  Read my 2-part series featuring these three options here. However, the monthly cost ranges from $5 for a bare bones option with 10 or fewer products up to more than $60 for more than 250 products and large file storage capacity.  These sites provide a service and are one option for selling digital goods, but what if I told you, for not much more than the cost of a bare bones plan, you could create your very own WordPress site with a full-featured storefront to sell your digital goods.  This is where we meet Easy Digital Downloads.

Meet Easy Digital Downloads

Easy Digital Downloads or often called EDD for short, is a complete ecommerce solution for selling digital products on WordPress.  Watch this video for a backstage tour of the plugin and see how easy it is to create a download.  It has a full shopping cart system, unlimited file downloads, download tracking and comprehensive reports for easy bookkeeping and sales statistics.  All you need is a domain (~$10/yr) and hosting for a WordPress site (~$5-10/mo).  You probably already have these!

EDD is a FREE plugin and even includes basic payment gateways (PayPal Standard and Amazon Payments) in the core plugin.  The free EDD plugin provides powerful ecommerce functionality, but you will need a WordPress theme to give your website a professional look and feel.  Many themes are designed just for use with EDD and create a beautiful shop with almost no design work needed by the store owner.  There are many FREE themes including Vendd and Themedd.  These themes all feature blog pages, so you can easily start to monetize your blog posts with links to digital download products for sale on you site.

Take it Further with Premium Extensions

Beyond the FREE plugin and themes offered by Easy Digital Downloads, they offer an incredible number of extensions at reasonable costs.  You can create a robust subscription site by combining the Recurring Payments extension with Content Restriction.  EDD also offers extensions for email marketing services such as ConvertKit and Mailchimp.  This means for each product in your store, you can choose which email list to subscribe a purchaser to.  You can also offer free downloads which is a great way to use your ecommerce site to deliver your lead magnets.

Easy Digital downloads is an incredibly powerful ecommerce solution and one that Registered Dietitians should consider using.  If you are interested in seeing EDD in action, RD2RD is powered by EDD including many premium extensions.

Be sure to grab a copy of my FREE e-book, “Leveraging Digital Goods: More Money, More Business” with a BONUS getting started checklist.  Enter your email, below!

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Megan Boitano

About the author: Registered dietitian nutritionist Megan Boitano, MS, RD, helps dietitians leverage their expertise and generate income via creation and sale of online nutrition resources. She is the founder of Well Resourced Dietitian, a digital marketplace for dietitians to both sell and buy original, digital materials for use in their nutrition practices, including ebooks, handouts, presentations, webinars, worksheets and more.