How To Make Money Selling Digital Products Online (Without Etsy)

Alston averages a $27 cart value selling digital planners. Those same planners sell on Etsy for $4.95. Same product, same buyers, wildly different outcome. The gap is not magic. It is the funnel.

If you sell on Etsy right now, you are leaving the majority of your revenue on the table every single day. Etsy caps your price, takes a cut, and never lets you talk to the person who just bought from you. This video walks through every part of the system Alston built at yourlifeandplanners.com using ClickFunnels, so you can see exactly where the extra money comes from, step by step, across seven distinct revenue touchpoints inside a single transaction.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A clear picture of why Etsy artificially limits your revenue on digital products
The seven money touchpoints inside a single digital product transaction
How an order bump alone can triple a $17 sale to $49 before the customer leaves the checkout page
How a $47 upsell page turns a one-product business into a multi-product funnel
Why collecting email addresses at the opt-in step is worth more than the first sale itself
The free and paid traffic channels that drive buyers to a self-hosted funnel
How to use ClickFunnels templates to launch without building a page from scratch
Which digital product niche fits your skills, answered at finder.platformproof.com

The Etsy Problem Nobody Talks About

Etsy is not a bad platform for getting your first eyes on a digital product. Thousands of creators discover that people will pay for their templates, planners, and printables there. The problem is what happens next.

When Alston looked at digital planners on Etsy, he noticed something. People were investing real time and creative energy building polished, well-designed planner bundles, and then pricing them at $4.95 because that is where the algorithm rewards volume. Etsy’s marketplace trains sellers to compete on price, and the ceiling on a digital planner listing sits around $10 before buyers start bouncing.

Beyond the price cap, there are three structural disadvantages built into every Etsy sale. First, Etsy takes a cut of each transaction. Second, you can only sell the one item the customer searched for. You cannot add a second product to the cart, a bonus offer at checkout, or a follow-up sequence. Third, you never get the customer’s email address. The sale happens, the file is delivered, and you have no path back to that person.

Selling your own digital products through your own funnel removes all three of those limits at once. You set the price. You control the checkout flow. You own the relationship.

Touchpoint 1: Sell the Product Yourself at a Higher Price

Alston sells the same category of digital planners as those $4.95 Etsy listings. His entry price is $17 for a bundle. That is more than three times the Etsy price, and buyers still convert because the page frames the value differently.

Instead of competing inside a marketplace where a dozen similar listings sit right below yours, the standalone sales page is the only option on the screen. There is no “customers also viewed” sidebar. There is no competitor one scroll away. You control the entire buying environment, which means you control how the offer is perceived.

The product itself, a bundle of digital planners at yourlifeandplanners.com, is the same type of thing Etsy buyers already want. The difference is the container you put it in. A ClickFunnels sales page with a clear headline, a short video, and a simple order form consistently outperforms a marketplace listing for average order value because there is no friction from competing options and no artificial price ceiling.

Touchpoint 2: The Order Bump

The order bump is the most underused tool in digital product sales, and it does not exist on Etsy at all.

Here is how it works on Alston’s funnel. The customer decides to buy the $17 planner bundle and lands on the checkout form. Right there, inside the order form before they hit the purchase button, is a checkbox offer: a collection of over 2,000 planner stickers added to the cart for an additional fee. The customer is already in buy mode. They already want to organize their life. The sticker collection is an obvious companion product.

When they check that box, the order total jumps from $17 to $49. That is one click, no extra page, no extra decision cycle. A meaningful portion of buyers take it. Not everyone. Alston is explicit about that. But enough people check the box that the average cart value climbs well above the baseline $17 price.

This is the mechanic behind that $27 average cart value. The starting price is $17. Some buyers add the bump and push the transaction to $49. Average those two groups together and you get a number in the mid-twenties. Etsy cannot do this. ClickFunnels templates have it built in out of the box.

Touchpoint 3: The Upsell Page

After the checkout form comes the upsell page. This is a separate screen that appears immediately after the customer completes their purchase. They have just paid. Their credit card is out. Their excitement about the planners is at its highest point. This is the moment to offer something bigger.

Alston’s upsell on this funnel is a financial organization product priced at $47. The logic is simple: a person who just bought a digital planner bundle wants to organize their life. Organizing finances is a natural next step. The upsell page is designed around that connection.

Not every buyer takes a upsell. Alston says this directly in the video. That is expected and fine. What matters is that some will, and each conversion adds $47 to that transaction with zero additional customer acquisition cost. You already paid to bring that customer to the page. The upsell is pure additional revenue on a buyer you already have.

You can hire someone on Fiverr to design the upsell page if copywriting is not your strength. Alston mentions this explicitly. You can also use ClickFunnels’ built-in templates and modify the headline and offer details to match your product. The infrastructure is not hard to set up. The concept is what most Etsy sellers have never been exposed to.

Touchpoint 4: Affiliate Offers on the Thank You Page

The thank you page is the confirmation screen a buyer sees after their purchase is complete. Most sellers use it to say “thank you, your download is ready.” Alston uses it to sell more.

Specifically, the thank you page includes affiliate product links. These are physical and digital products that align with what the buyer just purchased. In the planner niche, that might be a physical planner, a desk calendar, or a desk organizer from Amazon. Alston is enrolled in the Amazon affiliate program. When a buyer clicks one of those links and purchases anything within 24 hours, he earns a commission.

The buyer only sees the thank you page if they completed a purchase. That means every person who reaches it is already a proven buyer, not a window shopper. Affiliate click-through rates on thank you pages tend to be higher than cold traffic affiliate promotions for exactly that reason.

This touchpoint requires no product creation. You are recommending products that already exist. The only work is selecting products that genuinely fit what your buyer just purchased and adding your affiliate links to the page.

Touchpoint 5: Affiliate Offers Inside the Membership Site

Digital planners are typically delivered through a membership area, not a plain download link. This is a deliberate choice because it creates one more screen where you can place offers.

Inside the members area at yourlifeandplanners.com, after the buyer logs in and accesses their planner files, there is additional real estate on the page. Alston mentions an unadvertised bonus section in the membership dashboard. That section contains an affiliate product link. Buyers who click through and purchase earn Alston a commission, again with no additional customer acquisition cost.

You can also place Amazon affiliate links here under a “My Favorite Things” section or a “Tools I Use” section. Any purchase made through those links within the Amazon affiliate window generates a commission. The membership site is not just a file locker. It is a relationship asset and a revenue surface.

Touchpoint 6: The Email List

The very first thing Alston’s funnel does is collect an email address. Before anyone sees the sales page or the price, they enter their name and email into an opt-in form. This is the step that Etsy makes structurally impossible.

When someone does not buy after the opt-in, Alston still has their email. He can send them back to the offer. He can promote a different product. He can run a sequence that builds trust and eventually converts them. The opt-in is not just a lead generation tactic. It is a way to recover revenue from every person who showed enough interest to type their name into a box but was not ready to buy at that moment.

When someone does buy, they get added to a separate buyers list. That list is more valuable than a general email list because everyone on it has already proven they will spend money on your products. Future promotions, new product launches, seasonal deals, and referral requests all go to that list first. One buyer converted from cold traffic can generate multiple purchases over time if the email relationship is maintained.

Alston makes the case clearly: even if the customer never buys a product from the sales page, at the very least you have their email address where you can sell them additional products. That safety net does not exist when you sell on Etsy.

Touchpoint 7: Affiliate Offers in the Product Itself

The seventh touchpoint is inside the digital product itself. When you deliver a PDF planner, a template file, or a printable pack, you can include links within the document. These can be links to your own other products, or affiliate links to complementary tools and supplies the buyer will naturally want.

A planner buyer might need a specific type of notebook to print their pages in, or a brand of pens that works well on printed planner pages, or a laminator for creating durable covers. All of those can be Amazon affiliate links embedded in the product file itself. Every time a buyer uses the product and clicks through to purchase a recommended item, the affiliate commission gets triggered.

This is passive revenue on top of passive revenue. The product was created once. The affiliate links live inside it permanently. Every future download from every future buyer generates potential commissions with zero additional work.

Not sure which digital product type matches your skills and situation?

Get a personalized answer at finder.platformproof.com. The Finder asks you a few short questions and tells you the exact product type and platform to start with based on your background.

How to Build the Funnel with ClickFunnels

ClickFunnels is the tool Alston uses for this specific setup. He offers a two-week free trial via a link in the video description. The platform has a template library that removes most of the technical setup work.

Inside ClickFunnels, building the funnel goes like this. You click “Build New Funnel,” select “Sell a Product,” and choose between a membership funnel and a straight sales funnel. For digital products delivered through a members area, the membership option is the one Alston recommends. For simpler products with a download link, a standard sales funnel works fine.

Once you pick the funnel type, ClickFunnels loads a set of pre-built templates. These templates already include the four core pages: the opt-in page to collect email addresses, the sales page to present the product, the order form where the payment is processed, and the order confirmation page that doubles as your thank you page with affiliate offers.

You customize each template with your product name, your images, your price, and your copy. You connect a payment processor, typically Stripe or PayPal. You add the order bump inside the order form template. You build the upsell page using the upsell template. You connect your email service provider so opt-ins flow automatically into your list.

If any part of the page design is outside your skill set, Alston mentions Fiverr as a resource for hiring someone to build or customize the pages. The investment in having someone set up the funnel correctly one time is small compared to the ongoing revenue difference between a self-hosted funnel and an Etsy listing.

How to Drive Traffic to Your Funnel

The funnel only generates revenue when people are arriving at the opt-in page. Traffic is the variable that determines how fast results compound. Alston covers both free and paid channels in the video.

On the free side, he names Pinterest, Facebook groups, TikTok, and YouTube. Each of these has a different mechanism. Pinterest works well for visual products like planners because users actively search for organization content and pin it repeatedly, creating long-lived organic traffic from a single post. Facebook groups in the productivity and planning niche allow you to share your opt-in link with people who are already interested in the topic. TikTok and YouTube both reward consistent content creators with algorithmic reach, especially in the personal development and organization space.

On the paid side, Alston mentions Facebook ads, YouTube ads, Pinterest ads, and Instagram ads. He runs paid ads to his own digital planner funnel, which he says gets results faster than organic content. Paid traffic compresses the timeline from zero to consistent sales because you are not waiting for SEO or algorithm momentum. You pay to place your opt-in page in front of people who already match the buyer profile, and the funnel converts them through the seven touchpoints.

The important distinction is that the funnel makes paid traffic economically viable in a way that an Etsy listing cannot be. If you spend $1 per click sending people to an Etsy listing where the best case scenario is a $4.95 sale and a $3 profit after fees, paid ads will never be profitable. If that same $1 click enters a funnel where the average cart value is $27 across all seven touchpoints, the math changes completely.

The Step-by-Step Launch Order

Here is the practical sequence for building this system from scratch:

Pick a digital product in a niche where buyers clearly exist. Planners, templates, printables, Notion dashboards, and spreadsheets all work. Look at what sells on Etsy to validate demand, then plan to sell it yourself at a higher price with a fuller funnel.
Create the product or hire someone to create it. Canva handles most digital planner designs. If design is not your skill, Fiverr has creators who specialize in digital planners and template packs.
Set up your ClickFunnels account with the two-week free trial. Use the membership funnel template. Customize the opt-in page, sales page, and order confirmation page.
Add an order bump to the checkout form. Identify a complementary product that buyers in your niche will want alongside the main product. Stickers for planners, additional templates, or a related printable all work.
Build the upsell page at a price point of $37 to $67. Make it a natural progression from the main product. A deeper version of what they just bought, or a related skill or tool, converts best.
Place affiliate offers on the thank you page. Sign up for Amazon Associates and add 3 to 5 product links for physical items your buyer will naturally want.
Set up the membership delivery area inside ClickFunnels. Add the affiliate links in a “bonus resources” or “my favorites” section within the members area.
Connect your email service provider and build a short follow-up sequence for people who opt in but do not buy. A three to five email sequence over the first week after opt-in recovers a meaningful percentage of non-buyers.
Start traffic with free channels first. Post consistently on Pinterest and in relevant Facebook groups for 30 days to test your offer before adding paid traffic.
Add paid traffic once the funnel converts. Run Facebook or Pinterest ads to the opt-in page. Start with a small daily budget, measure the cost per opt-in and cost per purchase, and scale what is profitable.

Honest Drawbacks

The self-hosted funnel model is not a plug-and-play upgrade from Etsy. There are real tradeoffs to understand before you start.

Etsy sends you built-in traffic. Millions of buyers search on Etsy every day. When you move to a self-hosted funnel, zero traffic arrives automatically. Every visitor has to come from somewhere you built or paid for. This is a meaningful shift, especially in the early months before a content engine or paid ads are generating consistent opt-ins.

ClickFunnels has a monthly cost after the trial period ends. You will also need an email service provider. These are overhead costs that do not exist on Etsy. They are worth it once the funnel is converting at a healthy rate, but they require some upfront investment of time and money before the revenue covers them.

Building and maintaining a funnel requires more technical involvement than listing a product on Etsy. The ClickFunnels templates simplify this considerably, but you still need to understand what each page is doing and why it is structured the way it is. If something breaks in the checkout flow, you are responsible for diagnosing and fixing it rather than contacting marketplace support.

None of these drawbacks outweigh the revenue upside for someone serious about building a scalable digital product business. But they are worth naming clearly so you enter the process with accurate expectations.

Find Your X

The funnel structure Alston describes works across digital product niches, not just planners. The same seven touchpoints apply to Notion templates, budgeting spreadsheets, meal planning kits, photography presets, and business document packs. The product category is less important than the funnel architecture that surrounds it.

If you are not sure which type of digital product fits your skills, your schedule, and your income goals, visit finder.platformproof.com. The Finder takes a few minutes to complete and gives you a specific recommendation based on where you are right now, not a generic overview of every option that exists.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need ClickFunnels specifically, or can I use another funnel builder?

Alston uses ClickFunnels and mentions the two-week free trial as the starting point he recommends. Other funnel builders like Kartra, ThriveCart, and Systeme.io offer similar page templates and order bump functionality. The specific platform matters less than having a tool that supports opt-in pages, order bumps, upsell pages, and a delivery mechanism. ClickFunnels is simply the one Alston has personal experience building and testing with.

How much does it cost to start selling digital products this way?

The primary recurring cost is the ClickFunnels subscription after the free trial period. An email service provider adds another monthly cost depending on your list size. If you hire someone on Fiverr to design the pages or create the product, that is a one-time startup cost. Paid traffic is optional at the start and should be added only after the funnel is converting on free traffic first.

What types of digital products work best in a funnel like this?

Products that already have proven demand on Etsy are good candidates because you know buyers exist. Planners, printable calendars, Notion templates, spreadsheet tools, and worksheet packs all work well because they can be bundled, have natural companion products for the order bump, and attract buyers who will respond to follow-up offers in the same niche.

Why does the order bump work so well at the checkout stage specifically?

The buyer is already in an active purchase decision when they reach the order form. Their wallet is effectively out. A relevant add-on that complements the main product, priced lower than the main offer, requires very little additional persuasion because the buyer’s resistance to spending in this category is already low. The order bump is not an interruption. It is a natural addition to an order already in progress.

Is it ethical to stack this many offers in a single transaction?

Yes, if every offer delivers real value. The planner sticker bundle for people who buy digital planners is genuinely useful. The financial organization upsell for someone who wants to organize their life is a logical next product. Affiliate links for physical items that complement the digital purchase serve the buyer. None of these offers require anyone to buy anything they do not want. Every touchpoint is optional. The difference from Etsy is not manipulation. It is just giving buyers more opportunities to get more of what they came for.

How long does it take to see consistent sales with free traffic?

Free traffic from Pinterest, Facebook groups, TikTok, and YouTube takes longer to compound than paid traffic. Most creators see their first consistent opt-ins within 30 to 60 days of posting regularly, with purchases following as the email follow-up sequence matures. Paid ads can compress this to the first week if you are willing to test a daily budget before the funnel is proven.

What should the upsell offer be, and how do I price it?

The upsell should be a deeper version of the transformation the main product starts. If the main product is a planner bundle for general life organization, the upsell could be a financial planning system, a goal-setting workshop, or an advanced productivity template pack. Alston’s upsell is priced at $47. A range of $37 to $67 is common for digital product upsells where the main offer is in the $17 to $27 range. Price too high relative to the main offer and conversion rates drop; price too low and the economics do not meaningfully improve the transaction value.

What happens to someone who opts in but never buys?

They stay on your email list as a lead. A short automated sequence, typically three to five emails over the week following opt-in, gives non-buyers multiple chances to return to the sales page. Some will convert in that window. Others will buy a different product you promote later. The email address has ongoing value because you can continue marketing to that person indefinitely at no additional acquisition cost, unlike Etsy where a non-buying visitor is simply gone.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “How To Make Money Selling Digital Products Online 2021 – Make More Money Without Etsy,” YouTube (youtu.be/oGd7t_x-qE0)
yourlifeandplanners.com: live example of the digital planner funnel described in the video
ClickFunnels: funnel builder platform mentioned with a two-week free trial in the video description
Etsy digital planner category: used as baseline for market pricing comparison at $4.95 per listing