You’ve probably heard of a side hustle idea where you sell PDFs and digital products to make money.
When I started selling digital products, I didn’t have money. I didn’t have a huge following. I didn’t have any of the things people tell you that you “need” before you can make sales online.
What I had was knowledge. Skills. Experience I’d picked up along the way.
And I found out you could turn that into an actual digital product, something people would pay for.
I tried it. And I ended up making ten thousand dollars.
But here’s the part most people skip when they tell this story: the strategy.
I only ran hybrid ads on facebook groups one period and that was it.
Now without an audience, without ad money, without a following, how do you actually get in front of people who’ll buy?
I want to walk you through exactly what I did. It’s a strategy a lot of people don’t talk about much. And it’s simpler than you think.
Writing On Medium
If you’ve heard of Medium, you probably think of it as just a platform to read stories on.
Somewhere you go to spend twenty minutes with a good article.
But Medium is actually a platform where you can grow a personal brand and build an audience, one that’s primed and ready to buy high-quality digital products from you.
I love Medium for a few reasons, and I want to break them down.
1) Medium already has a built-in partner program. You don’t have to build the infrastructure yourself. It’s already there, already working, already sending readers your way.
2) Medium’s audience is different. These are readers. People who are used to sitting with an idea for more than five seconds. People who read long-form content because they want depth, not just a headline and a scroll.
And that matters, because it’s long-form content. That means you actually have room to work with.
You have enough space, enough time, to build trust with someone within a single post to take them from “who is this person” to “I believe what they’re saying” to “I want what they’re offering.”
You can’t do that in a caption. You can do that in an article.
So if you want to start selling digital products with no money, here’s the exact strategy I used.
Step 1: Set Up Your Medium Profile
This costs nothing. Zero dollars. You don’t need to pay for the partner program to get started, it’s free to join, free to publish, free to build from day one.
Just get your profile up. Clean bio, clear picture of what you’re about. That’s it for step one.
Step 2: Study The Top Writers In Your Niche
Find the top ten writers in your niche and follow them consistently. Don’t just follow and forget, actually pay attention to what they’re doing.
Look at their most viral articles. Study the titles. Study the structure. Study what made people stop scrolling and start reading.
Keep track of it all in a Notion page. Every viral title you find, every hook that grabs you, every structure that works, write it down. This becomes your swipe file, your reference point for when you sit down to write your own.
Step 3: Write A Viral Article Using The Right Principles
Now take what you’ve learned, the titles, the hooks, the patterns and write your own article built around the “know, like, and trust” principle.
That’s really what this step is about.
Nobody buys from a stranger. People buy from someone they feel they know a little, someone they like, someone they trust. Your article is where that happens.
You’re not just informing someone, you’re building a relationship with them in real time, one paragraph at a time.
This is the piece people underestimate. It’s not about tricking anyone into anything. It’s about genuinely earning their attention long enough to show them who you are and what you can help them with.
Step 4: Sell Your Digital Product Within The Article
This is where it comes together. Once you’ve built that trust within your article, you sell your digital product right there. You can use a tool like Gumroad to handle the actual delivery and payment side of things.
The article does the work of showing clients why they need your product. The tool does the logistics.
Why This Works For Beginners
This is the exact strategy I used to sell digital products, and I want to be clear — it’s beginner friendly. You don’t need thousands of followers. You don’t need an ad budget. You don’t need to show your face.
What you need is knowledge worth sharing, a willingness to study what works, and the patience to write something that actually earns someone’s trust.
That’s it. That’s how I did it with no money. And it’s how you can start too.
That said, if you want to learn my exact strategy for writing viral stories on Medium, then definitely check out my medium income playbook here.