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What should actually go on a sales page for a digital product?

What a sales page for a digital product needs, in the order a reader actually reads it — and what to leave off.

Gizella Nagyne Palinkas

9/6/20266 min read

A sales page for a digital product needs five things: what the product is, who it is for, what is inside it, what it costs, and what happens after payment. Everything else on the page is decoration, and most of it should go.

That sounds blunt, and it is meant to. Sales pages get long because writing more feels like doing more. But a page is not read the way it is written — it is read from the top, quickly, by someone deciding whether to keep going. The job is not to say everything. It is to answer the five questions in the order a stranger asks them.

A sales page is not a website

This is the first thing worth separating out, because the two get built as one thing and then neither works.

Your website's job is to let someone wander: read a post, look around, decide whether they trust you. A sales page has one visitor with one question — is this thing for me? — and one exit, the buy button. Every additional link on that page is a door out of the room.

So the page has no menu it does not need, no sidebar, no newsletter pop-up, no "you might also like". If you have a site that does the wandering job well, the sales page can afford to do nothing but sell.

Attention runs out faster than the page does

Here is the part that changes how you order the page rather than how you write it.

Nielsen Norman Group analysed 1.5 million eyetracking fixations across hundreds of websites and found that 81% of users looked at the opening paragraph of a page, 71% at the second, 63% at the third — and 32% at the fourth. Attention does not decline gently. It falls off a shelf.

An earlier analysis from the same group put a ceiling on the whole page: on an average visit, users have time to read at most 28% of the words, and 20% is the more likely figure. Half the content gets read only on pages of 111 words or fewer.

Two consequences follow, and neither is "write less" exactly:

Whatever is in paragraph four is being read by roughly a third of the people who read paragraph one. So the thing you were saving for later needs to move up.
Headings and the first line of each section are doing most of the work, because that is what a scanner picks up on the way down.

Note the dates on that research — 2013 and 2008. It is old, it predates the phone-first web, and it is measuring reading behaviour rather than buying behaviour. What it is good for is the shape of attention, which has not obviously improved since.

The order that matches how the page is read

Not a formula, a sequence. Each item answers the question the last one creates.

A one-line name of the thing. "A 42-page guide to setting up your first digital product." Not a promise, not a feeling — the object.
Who it is for, in the reader's words. One sentence. "For someone who has an idea and no shop." Specific enough that some people rule themselves out. That is the point.
What is inside. A contents list. Chapters, templates, worksheets, counts. This is the single most under-used block on most pages and the one buyers scan hardest.
The price, next to the contents list. Not at the bottom. A reader who cannot find the price assumes it is bad news.
What happens after payment. Format, file size, how it arrives, on what device it opens. Digital products die at this step more often than at the price step.
One button. Then the same button again further down, saying the same words.
Answers to the two or three questions people actually ask you. If nobody has asked you anything yet, leave this out rather than inventing it.

Show the product, don't only describe it

A cover image is not evidence. It is a picture of a lid.

Show one real page from inside — a worksheet, a spread, a chapter opening. Blur nothing. If a reader can see the typography and the layout, they stop wondering whether the thing exists in the form you say it does. For a template or a spreadsheet, a screenshot of it filled in beats an empty one, because the filled version shows what using it looks like.

What to leave off

Anything about money made. Not yours, not a buyer's, not "what this could be worth". A method page describes a method.
Countdown timers and invented scarcity. A digital file cannot run out, and a reader who works that out has learned something about you rather than the product.
A second offer. One page, one thing. The moment there is a choice, the decision changes from yes or no to which — and which is much easier to postpone.
The origin story, at the top. Move it below the button or cut it. It answers a question nobody has asked yet at that point in the page.

The half-hour check

Do this rather than a redesign.

Open the page on your phone. Read it out loud, from the top, as if reading it to somebody else. Mark every place you stumble, skim ahead, or feel the need to explain something the page does not say. Then fix only those places.

Reading aloud catches what re-reading silently cannot: sentences that scan on a laptop and collapse in the mouth. It takes about twenty minutes on a normal page and it is the highest-return edit available.

Take the quiz: is your page ready?

Six questions about the page as it stands right now — structure, order and the after-payment gap. It takes about two minutes and gives you a specific next edit rather than a general feeling.

Frequently asked questions

Q: How long should a sales page for a digital product be? A: Long enough to answer the five questions — what it is, who it is for, what is inside, the price, and what happens after payment — and no longer. Length is not the variable that matters; order is. Nielsen Norman Group's reading research suggests users take in only about a fifth of the words on an average visit, so a longer page mostly means a larger unread portion. Write the page, then cut a third of it and see what you genuinely miss.

Q: Should the price be on the sales page or at checkout? A: On the page, near the contents list. A reader who has to click through to find the price treats the absence as a warning. Ella Wealth Community's guidance across every brand is the same: say what the reader gets first, then the price, in that order and on the same screen. Hiding it does not remove the objection — it just moves it to the moment when someone is most likely to leave.

Q: Do I need testimonials before I can sell anything? A: No, and inventing them is worse than having none. If nobody has bought yet, the page can carry evidence of the product instead of evidence of buyers: real images from inside it, a full contents list, a clear description of the format. Add real feedback later, quoted accurately and only with permission. A page with no testimonials and a visible contents list is more convincing than a page with vague praise from nobody in particular.

Q: What's the difference between a sales page and a landing page? A: A landing page usually collects something — an email address, a sign-up — in exchange for something free. A sales page asks for money. The structure differs because the decision differs: a free download needs one reason and a box, while a purchase needs to answer format, delivery and price before the button. Trying to do both on one page usually means the free thing wins and the sale does not happen.

Q: How often should I rewrite my sales page? A: Rarely, once it is structurally sound. Constant rewriting is often avoidance of the harder job, which is getting the right people to the page in the first place. A sensible rhythm is to read it aloud on a phone once a quarter, add answers to any question you have been asked more than twice since the last check, and otherwise leave it alone.

Q: Where should the buy button go? A: Immediately after the contents list and price, and again at the end. Two instances of the same button with the same words. Do not vary the wording between them — a reader who sees two differently-worded buttons has to work out whether they do the same thing, and that pause is not free.

Get the free guide

The Digital Product Beginners Guide covers the part before the page: choosing a niche, building the thing, and getting it up for sale in order.

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When you want the whole method written down

Creating a Digital Product in 6 Steps takes it from idea to a page that is live, one step at a time.

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