Whether you're looking to sell a digital download or a physical product, there are plenty of marketplaces online to help you make that first sale. Although Amazon may be the most popular option, those looking to start their entrepreneurial journey on a less crowded platform should consider selling on Gumroad.
Offering a user-friendly interface and a smooth sales process that's hard to beat, the platform is quickly becoming a developer favourite. If you're thinking of getting into Gumroad or looking for ways to increase sales for your Gumroad business, we've got nine tips to get you started.
What is Gumroad?
Gumroad is an e-commerce platform where anyone can buy or sell any product or service. The platform allows developers and entrepreneurs to set up intuitive landing pages to host their products and convert visitors into paying customers.
What can you sell on Gumroad?
Gumroad was created to help developers sell anything. That's the appeal of Gumroad: developers can experiment with different ideas and formats until they find a product or products that resonate with their audience and generate revenue.
On Gumroad, you can sell both digital (downloadable) and physical goods. Here are some examples:
Digital products
Selling digital products is a low-risk and effortless way to immerse yourself in entrepreneurship and earn money online.
Some digital products you can sell on Gumroad are:
- Music: Independent artists can release and sell their albums and singles.
- Online courses and videos: Course creators can sell their online courses, video lessons and tutorials, or even webinars.
- Printables – Think checklists, worksheets, and printable art.
- Digital Art: Illustrators and photographers can sell digital copies of their artwork, photos and more.
- E-books: Authors can self-publish and sell their e-books on the platform.
- Monthly Subscriptions: Give your audience exclusive premium content by selling subscriptions.
- Templates: From resumes to expense reports, you can create and sell all kinds of templates.
Physical goods
Do you want to do physical merchandising? Here are some types of products you can sell on Gumroad:
- Print Books: From comics to non-fiction, authors can sell print books of all genres.
- Physical artwork and tools: Artists can sell physical sketches and paintings. You can also sell art tools such as pens, brushes, watercolors, oil paints and more.
- Apparel: This could be sportswear, formal wear, or graphic t-shirts designed by you.
- Fitness equipment: yoga pants, fitness smartwatches, resistance bands, etc.
9 Steps to start selling on Gumroad
Money doesn't fall from the tree: the adage applies to running a rubber road business. You can't expect money to flow just by opening a store and putting a product there. In order to see the results, preliminary work is necessary.
If you want to make money on Gumroad, here's what you need to know:
1. Research
Like any other business, the only way to make money on Gumroad is to sell what people really want to buy. In order to create a great product that generates sales, you need to do research to find out what your target market needs. You can't guess or figure this out just by reading blogs or watching a TikTok. You need to study your target audience, your product, and your competitors.
target audience
Your target audience is potential customers who will want to buy your product when you launch it. Understanding what your audience wants is important if you want to create something they're willing to pay for.
To know what your audience wants, you need to know:
- Their age bracket.
- Their income range.
- Where they reside.
- The kinds of jobs they work.
- A problem they’re facing.
- The solution they’re looking for.
- The roadblocks that are stopping them from solving their problem.
If you know all of this information about your target audience, you can create a product that will overcome these obstacles and give them the solution they need.
Product
When deciding on the product you want to create, you should look for similar products and study them. No matter how good your product idea is, chances are someone else has already made it happen. So study the features, design elements and trends of other products and use that inspiration to create something unique and valuable.
Competitors
After reviewing products similar to yours, find out who sells them and gather information about them. For example:
- What other products do you offer?
- What are customers saying about your products? Are their reviews positive or negative?
- What is your most popular product?
- How do you structure your product pages?
- Are there any obvious marketing tactics they use that you can use?
Studying your competitors is one of the best ways to find out what works and what doesn't. Understand how they run their business, improve it, and apply it to your Gumroad business.
2. Create a landing page for your product
One of the best things about Gumroad is that it lets you create a landing page for your product for free. It has a flexible page builder that lets you set up a storefront and customize your website colors to match your brand.
When creating your landing page, there are a few things to keep in mind:
Pictures
Images tend to grab a person's attention better and faster than text. Therefore, use high-quality images on your landing page, especially for your product thumbnail. Buyers rely on high-quality thumbnails to understand what your product is about. Therefore, the image should clearly show what your customers will receive when they make their purchase.
If you are not very good at designing images, you may need to hire a professional to help you. If you're working on a tight budget, you can use tools like Canva to design attractive images.
Product Description
Once shoppers see your images, they dive right into your product description to learn more about your product and how it can help them. Be sure to write and format your product description so that it's easy to read.
While Gumroad doesn't allow you to be completely liberal with wild colors and fonts, it does provide handy formatting options like headings, italics, bold, and detailed lists. Using these features makes it easy for potential customers to analyze your content and quickly understand what you're selling.
Customer references
Buyers visiting your store for the first time need proof that your product is worth their money. For this reason, you need to collect testimonials from customers who have tried and liked your product. If you sell courses or provide a service, you can post a case study or video report detailing how you helped your customers solve their problem.
Add these testimonials and case studies to your landing page. This builds trust with your prospects and shows them that you can help them get the results they want.
While these elements will help you create a great landing page on Gumroad, you should optimize the page for search engines and run split tests from time to time to improve conversions.
3. Price your products accordingly
When pricing a product, you need to make sure the value is something your target audience can afford. Fortunately, Gumroad allows creators to be flexible when it comes to pricing. There is the price segmentation option which allows you to set different price levels. You can also offer a product for free and give customers a “fair price”. This is a great strategy if your audience is made up of both low-income and high-income people.
Gumroad also allows you to offer an installment option for customers who cannot afford the individual price. Accepting recurring payments is included for all your customers and works great whether you're selling a series, regular content, or recent products.
4. Promote your Gumroad store
If people can't find your store, you're not making money with Gumroad. It sounds harsh, but it's true. Many Gumroad users think that once they create their storefront, the platform will automatically take care of their marketing, but this is not the case.
Gumroad allows creators to promote their products and services on many different platforms and provides them with the resources to do so, but it's up to you to publicize your offerings on those platforms.
Here are some places to market your products:
Social networks
When marketing your Gumroad business, social media is the first place to be. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube have massive reach and can help direct browsers to your product pages.
Create accounts for your brand on these platforms, post regularly and engage with your audience. Talk about your business from time to time and encourage them to visit and buy from your store.
Search engines
Search engines like Google can be a constant source of traffic to your Gumroad store if your pages are optimized for search.
You can do this by using the right keywords in your title, subtitle, content, etc. As long as you follow SEO best practices, your store will be visible to potential customers searching for your product or keywords related to your product.
Paid Advertising
Paying for ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Google is a great way to drive traffic and generate leads for your gumroad store. It costs money, yes, but if you target correctly and have a great product, you'll make more money than your ad spend.
Email
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to promote your business because you are communicating directly with people who are so interested in your product or content that they have given you their email address. -mail.
Emails are the perfect way to let your audience know about discounts, specials, and upcoming releases. Tools like MailerLite, ConvertKit, and HubSpot make it easy to create and send effective emails.
5. Take advantage of Gumroad’s features
Since its inception, Gumroad has continuously implemented features to help shoppers easily find, review, and purchase products. Using these built-in features can increase the visibility of your products, which in turn generates revenue.
In particular, there are two peculiarities to which you should pay attention:
Discover the Gumroad
The Discover feature allows Gumroad to list your products as "Recommended" for customers who have just purchased something. This feature works in two ways: when someone buys from you, Gumroad recommends products from other creators. When a customer buys from another creator, Gumroad recommends your product to them.
Gumroad charges a 10% fee for this feature, but that's not much considering the money you make when people find out about your product through this feature.
Keywords
Gumroad tags help buyers filter Gumroad search results to find what they are looking for. When you brand your products, they're more likely to show up in search and be seen by potential customers.
Although Gumroad lets you see the most popular tags, you should focus on the tags that are most relevant to your products, not the ones that give you the most exposure.
6. Recruit product affiliates (or be one yourself)
One of the best features of Gumroad is the ability to use affiliates to promote your products.
Affiliates are people such as industry experts, influencers, and content creators who agree to promote your products to their audience in exchange for a percentage of sales.
Using affiliates for your Gumroad store is important because it allows you to reach audiences that you probably wouldn't otherwise have access to. And if you're new to Gumroad, it's a great way to quickly get your products out there, drive traffic, and make sales.
Gumroad pre-verifies all affiliates in its program, so you don't have to worry about people promoting your products on underperforming or uneven websites.
While trying to attract affiliates to your business, also try to become an affiliate on Gumroad. There's no rule that says you can't promote other Gumroad products while selling your own. If you have a popular blog or a large following on social media, you can earn extra money by promoting other creators' products. Be careful, however, not to promote products that compete with yours, otherwise you will inadvertently reduce your income.
7. Automate your follow-up email sequences
Gumroad has a GDPR compliant feature called "Workflows" that allows you to send follow-up emails to your customers and audience.
These emails can help you increase your sales (when you send relevant products related to the first product purchased) and increase customer retention (when you send useful information about the product purchased by the customer). However, setting up and sending the right follow-up emails can be tricky, especially if you have a lot of customers and offer a lot of different products.
This is why you should automate your tracking sequences. Instead of manually sending emails every time you onboard a new customer, set up sequences once to deliver them on autopilot. It gives you time to focus on other things that can scale your business.
8. Sell multiple products in the same niche
Gumroad is so flexible that it can offer different products in different categories. While that sounds great, it's far better to focus on what you're good at and offer multiple products in that niche. Bonus points if certain products complement each other and can be purchased together. This way, you get to know your target audience inside and out, build a well-known brand around that niche, and ultimately earn more money.
9. Offer your customers more
Let's face it: e-commerce can be competitive. If you want to make more money with your business, you need to offer your audience more than your competitors. Here are some ideas that may help:
Gifts
Who doesn't love free stuff? If you want to engage your audience and build trust, prepare useful and relevant resources such as e-books, checklists, worksheets or email courses and offer them for free in exchange for their email. mail.
While this ensures that you can reach them if you want to promote a paid product, you don't have to wait until then. Instead, in free resources, you can add links to your paid products to encourage sales.
Discounts
Generating affiliate coupons and discount codes is an effective way to attract customers without giving away free resources.
Guarantees
Promising a replacement or a full refund if your customers aren't happy with your product can be risky, but it shows customers that your products are high quality and that you can trust your business. They will be more likely to buy your product because you have removed the risk factor influencing their decision.
Make the most out of your Gumroad store
Gumroad does not charge monthly fees and only takes part when you make a sale. If you can produce quality products and promote your business to the right customers, selling products on Gumroad can help create a new source of income.
All you have to do is take advantage of Gumroad's great features and market your business through one or more channels including search engines, social media, and email.
Richelle Johnson