Selling Informational Products on Gumroad & Revenue Boosting Tips

Gumroad is an online marketplace where you can sell mostly digital products. Some physical goods are sold there too, but they’re known for digital products. Ebook, video and audio training courses are frequently sold here. Twitter entrepreneurs will often try to utilize Gumroad once they’ve reached a few thousand followers.

Memberships and subscription-based services are allowed here as well. Email newsletters and even podcasts can be turned into services that provide you with monthly payments. Digital artists have a lot of success on Gumroad. Avatars are some of the most popular sellers on the entire site, plus you can also make training courses for aspiring artists.

This is a popular place for beginners to sell products since it’s really easy to use. I have some tips to share to help you maximize your earnings on this site and with your info products in general. By using Gumroad and other options to sell your products, you can earn more and gain more exposure.

Why Sell on Gumroad?

Simply listing things for sale on this digital product marketplace isn’t very likely to bring you a lot of sales. The most successful users on this site actually have their own audience elsewhere that they can use to promote their listings to. By driving your own traffic to these listings, you boost their sales levels and reviews, which then makes it more likely for others to find you on Gumroad.

In general, Gumroad can be great for beginners to use. It allows you to avoid the technical aspects of selling and delivering a digital purchase to a customer. You also don’t need your own website, so if you’re not quite sure if you’ll created and sell digital products long-term then it can be a useful option to get started.

There are even affiliate marketing options on this network, so others can promote your products to earn a commission. Overall, you’ll be able to top into additional customers and possibly even extra traffic here, so this does have the potential to offer higher revenue than selling privately.

Gumroad Fees

Fees to sell on Gumroad are based on each sale, so you can start selling here without it costing you any money. When you’re first getting started, you’ll pay much higher fees. As you sell more products, your fees will reduce. This makes it a much more viable side hustle when you put a lot of focus into making sales on this network.

The first $1,000 in sales is charged a much higher fee (as high as 9.5% plus 30 cents per transaction). This becomes decent fees at $10,000+ and even more reasonable once you top $100,000 in sales, but only a small number of sellers reach that level. There’s a reason for this fee structure though. Most vendors are likely to only make a handful of lifetime sales because they won’t bring their own traffic or make low quality products that aren’t popular. This simply means that the vast majority of revenue is charged a higher fee.

Ultimately, I feel like you have better options if you can generate 100k+ in sales on Gumroad, but there’s also certainly nothing wrong with selling in multiple places to maximize your reach and earnings potential.

Info Product Creation Tips

No matter what kind of digital products you decide to create and sell, I strongly urge you to put in a lot of time and effort to make them high-quality. The easiest way to get started with outside factors working against you is to produce garbage just for the sake of taking someone’s money. You’ll likely end up with bad reviews on your products, which will drastically reduce sales. On top of that, you’re much less likely to have repeat customers.

Informational product creation and selling is not a get rich quick scheme. To do this right, it’s going to take time to build up the business to make a lot of money. Be patient and deliver really useful training and other products to customers. Over time, you’ll grow your audience and your number of customers. This results in higher earnings the longer you do it, especially since people are much more likely to buy from you again in the future when you release really great products.

Do your research before you make something to sell. This can save you a lot of waste time since some products can be a huge hit while others are a complete flop. Make sure you’re building something that your audience actually wants and would be willing to pay money to get. If need be, you can actually poll your audience and simply ask them what they want. Also take a look at competitors to see what has sold great for them to get an idea of what will be more profitable.

Other Marketplace Options

Don’t just limit yourself to Gumroad. There are numerous other online marketplaces where you can list digital goods for sale, and some of them are even more popular than Gumroad. ClickBank and JVZoo have both been around for a long time. I’m actually in the top 10% of vendors and affiliates on the JVZoo network. Fees on these sites are much more reasonable and the affiliates here can have some serious promotional power.

The bad news about these other sites is that it can be much more difficult to get started, especially for a beginner. These sites are mostly used by professional internet marketers and info product creators. We’re talking about some of the original creators of this entire industry use these sites and some have even been involved in their creation.

If you have your own audience to drive sales and just want a platform to handle the technical aspects, JVZoo can be great and give you lower fees than Gumroad. However, if you hope to get affiliates on these other, larger networks then you’re going to need to be able to deliver some powerful promotions for other vendors there first. The best affiliates there are often other vendors, and they’ll support people that can give them a lot of support. Even after using JVZoo myself for many years and driving well over 10,000 sales as both a vendor and an affiliate, I still found it difficult to get the really major players to participate in my product launches.

Sell on Your Own Website

With a relatively minor amount of work and very limited technical knowledge, you can actually set up your own website to sell your digital products. You’ll be responsible for driving all of the traffic to make sales, but this may not be an issue for you if you have your own audience on social media sites or a newsletter list. The advantage is that you only pay fees to a payment processor like Stripe or PayPal, which will usually be around 3%. You can simply put more of your sales into your pocket as profit by using your own site.

Setup can be fairly easy using a combination of WordPress and WooCommerce on a website. WooCommerce is usually used for physical product sales on e-commerce websites, but you can also use it to deliver digital product sales. The entire system is automated for you, so customers get an automatic delivery of their purchase to download right after they pay. You don’t have to do any work except send people to the website and possibly provide customer service.

I personally prefer to use my own website for most digital product sales to maximize profits. In general, I’ll only sell my info products on third-party websites these days if I’ve just created a new product and want to have a launch where many affiliates all promote it at once. What will work best for you will really depend on your skill level and comfort with this sales strategy.