Create & Sell Digital Products for Multiple Streams of Passive Income

Would you love to earn at least $1,000 per month passively simply by selling digital products?

I’ve been creating and selling digital products since 2007 (mainly ebooks) and I’m going to show you how you can earn passive income with a simple digital product too.

In fact, $1,000 per month is a very conservative goal because you can easily make $5,000, $10,000 and even $20,000+ per month purely through selling digital products.

So let’s dive in.

What Is a Digital Product?

A digital product is a virtual product, i.e. it’s not tangible. They are created and sold online without anyone having to physical hold them.

The only time they become tangible is if you print off an ebook or some printables.

Is Selling Digital Products Profitable?

Yes!

Digital products can be enormously profitable for five main reasons:

#1. They have no start-up costs. You can create digital products by using various free online resources, of which I mention later.

#2.  You create the digital product only once, and then it automatically sells 24/7 for months and even years to come.

#3.  They’re easy to tweak and add more information to, in order to keep improving it.

#4.  People are always seeking out new information to find answers to their problems or to learn something new etc. Therefore, people are more than willing to pay for this information.

#5.  With digital products you get instant access to them. You don’t have to wait for a book or a video DVD to be posted and mailed to you. This makes it so much more appealing to potential buyers.

The Different Types of Digital Products

There’s plenty of different types of digital products which you can create and sell.

Here’s a list of digital products you can create:

Although online courses are extremely popular, they are time-consuming and quite complex to create. So this list is refreshing to see as it shows other types of digital products which are much easier to create than a course.

The types of digital products are also known as digital product modalities.

Digital Product Topic Ideas

So although you now know the different digital product modalities you can create, your actual first step is to find the topic of your digital product.

This is the first and most important step.

The reason you find your digital product topic first is because the topic dictates as to what type of digital product best presents your information.

Because digital products are basically ‘information products’, the topic tends to solve a pressing problem your target market are currently experiencing. So you go out there and do your research to find a problem to solve, and then you choose which digital product modality best suits the solution you’re presenting.

So for example:

If you’re going to solve one specific problem, could you cover this with a simple ‘how to’ ebook?

eBook: How To Get Rid of Adult Acne With Food

If your problem solving solution is more action orientated, could you do this with a set of printables?

Printables: Household Budgeting & Organization Checklists

So think about what problem could you solve with a digital product?

Related Reading: 67 Digital Product Topic Ideas for Inspiration

Best Digital Products To Sell

A lot of people tend to go straight for an online course to create and sell, but you really have to know if it will sell first (and sell well) before you start to create it.

Selling Online Courses

Creating an online course is undertaking a lot of your time and resources so I would always err on the side of caution before you jump into creating a course as your first digital product.

Ideally you should create a simple digital product first, such as an ebook for example. If the ebook sells really well, then you can think about creating an online course from the ebook content.

You already know it will sell and you also have the basic foundations (your ebook) to get started on creating an online course or even a membership site.

Most Profitable Digital Products to Sell

I would say the most profitable digital products to sell are online courses and membership sites.

However, it depends on what your monetary goals are.

But, I’ve seen some people who run memberships sites close them down then turn them into an online course –  because online courses are more profitable up-front.

So you could sell a course for $397 and/or have a membership site selling for $37 per month.

You would only need ten members paying $37 per month for you to make $397 per month recurring.

To hit the milestone of $1,000 per month you would need to get 27 paying members.

If you sold ten copies of your course per month that would be $3,970 per month as one-off payments.

Of course the best scenario would be to have both.

What Digital Products Sell Best

To answer this question, I would say that the digital products that sell really well are the low-cost ones.

You’ll always get more people buying a $47 ebook or a $27 set of printables, than you would of a $997 online course.

Also, you have to take in the fact of how popular the subject matter is.

If you sold a course on ‘How to Knit for People Who are Left-Handed’ for $997 then you know you’ll only sell a few per month because it’s a very small niche and also not many people have that kind of disposable money.

But if you sold an ebook on ‘How to Get rid of Acne Purely Through Diet’ for $49 then you could potentially sell dozens of copies per month because it’s a popular subject and most people can afford $49.

Memberships are probably one of the toughest digital products to sell because people have to make a commitment to pay $37 (or whatever) on a monthly basis. But on the flip side, lots of people like to be a part of a community so memberships actually do sell well.

How To Create Digital Products

Obviously it depends on the type of product as to how you create it.

For PDF documents such as ebooks and printables you can use Word, Canva, PicMonkey or Google docs and Google slides.

eBooks: Word or Google Docs

Printables: Canva, Google Slides

For online courses and membership sites, you’ll need video recording software such as Zoom, Vimeo or Loom.

With online courses and membership sites, you’ll have to learn how to do video recordings along with editing and sound control, which is a skill to be learned and it comes easier to some than others.

Best Platform To Sell Digital Products

There are now lots of different digital product delivery services available today, which is good to have that choice, but it also makes it difficult to choose the best platform.

Obviously I haven’t tried all of them, but I have tried a few.

So in my opinion I would recommend Send Owl to you.

I’ve used SendOwl for a few years now and I still continue to use it today, despite new digital delivery services sprouting up.

I use Send Owl on this very site to sell my little digital PDF documents such as my Passive Income Starter Kit and my Business Planning Toolkit.

Related Reading: Digital Product Delivery: How To Use SendOwl

You can start using SendOwl with a free 30 day trial, then you can start with their lowest cost plan of just $12 per month.

How To Sell Digital Products Online

How To Promote and Market Your Digital Product

Payment Processors

It depends on what type of digital product you create and where you sell it.

For ebooks and printables to sell from your own website or blog, you need to subscribe to a digital product delivery service where they send the product to your customers automatically for you.

For courses you would need to purchase, or subscribe to, a platform which hosts your online course, such as Teachable, and they have an inbuilt payment processor.

And for membership sites you would purchase a plugin, assuming you use WordPress, such as WishList Member to host your membership site on, and again, these plugins also have inbuilt payment processors.

Digital Marketing

Then of course to sell digital products you need to market them continuously and effectively.

You need to know where your ideal customer ‘hangs out’ online and then target that platform.

For example, do they congregate on Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest the most?

Find this out then spend your time on the most important platform first and master that.  Then move onto a second platform and master that.

Related Reading: The Six Main Types of Digital Marketing

Don’t spread yourself across multiple platforms all at the same time.  This will only dilute your efforts. It’s far more effective to ‘conquer’ one platform completely before moving onto another.

Digital Products to Sell on Etsy

Etsy is an ecommerce platform where you can sell all things craft, vintage or handmade. Most of the items sold on Etsy are tangible such as jewelry, bags, clothing etc.

However, you can also sell digital products on Etsy too.

Digital items which sell well on Etsy are:

So basically anything that can be downloaded and printed off.

If you think of Etsy as an ecommerce platform similar to Amazon in that people actually go to the platform specifically to look for items to purchase. So you already have customers on Etsy typing keywords into the search bar to compare items ready to purchase.

This is great as you have customers coming to the platform with their credit card in hand!

However (yes, there’s always a ‘but’) there’s also a LOT of competition on Etsy too.  And printables are becoming increasingly popular among sellers on Etsy so you would be competing against some very strong sellers.

Some of the printables on Etsy are outstanding.  Some people have amazing design skills which makes the competition even harder.

I personally don’t have great design skills so I could never compete with some of these sellers.

How To Sell Digital Products on Shopify

I’ve put this section in here because I’ve seen people asking this question.

The thing is Shopify wasn’t designed to be a digital product ecommerce platform.  It’s main purpose is an ecommerce platform for tangible products.

I’m not saying you can’t sell digital products on Shopify because you could, but I personally don’t see why you would want to pay $29 a month for a Shopify store just to sell digital products when you could sell them from your own website with a digital product delivery service such as SendOwl for only $9 per month.

You still need to market and promote a Shopify store just the same as you would with your own website or blog anyway.

Just my opinion 🙂

What Is a Digital Product Business?

When you think about it, the Internet is a massive information super-highway to learn new things.

Everyone is learning from someone online.

It’s information which makes the Internet go round, and digital products is at the forefront of information – with blog posts being the primary source.

A Stable Business Model

So to create a digital product business is a very smart move because as long as the Internet is around, then you have a very stable and viable business model.

What you want to aim for is to have multiple digital products on various topics and on various modems (ebooks, courses, memberships etc.). This then makes your information product business even more robust just in case a certain topic falls out of flavor.

Once your digital products are created, you then need to automate the selling process and have strategic digital marketing activities in place to sell your products 24/7.

In a Nutshell

So in a nutshell, a digital product business is where you have multiple digital products on various topics and modems solving solutions/problems for a very specific target audience.

I like to call this a digital product suite.

You then have automated systems put in place so you can make a passive income from your digital marketing empire.

Why a Digital Product Business Is The Bee’s Knees!

My First Digital Product

Creating and selling digital products has been a passion of mine since 2007 when I created and sold my first digital product online.

My first digital product was an ebook called ‘How To Run Your Own Management House Cleaning Business: Discover The $100K Formula’.  You see, I used to run my own domestic cleaning business where I worked from home running the business while I employed two cleaners to do the cleaning.

After I closed the business down I realized I could profit from the knowledge and experience which I had acquired and decided to put all that information into an ebook to help others to set up and profit from their own management house cleaning business.

I succeeded in getting the ebook sales page on the first page of Google* and I would wake up in the morning to find that I had sold a couple of copies of the ebook while I slept.

I was amazed and totally overjoyed by this new way for me to make money online and I became absolutely hooked on making passive income by creating and selling digital products thereafter.

And now I’m passing my digital product business experience and knowledge on to you so you too can start making passive income with your own digital information product business.

*Note: You can’t get a single sales page to rank on Google anymore like you could in 2007, but there’s still plenty of other ways to promote and sell digital products, so don’t worry.

My Digital Product Empire

Well, not exactly an empire but altogether I’ve wrote twelve ‘how to’ ebooks.

I’ve also created and sold dozens of printables such as planners and worksheets in the blogging niche.

I just find it so easy to write and create ebooks on any subject that I know people will want to learn about.

Your $1,000 Per Month Formula

This is the exciting part – how much money can you make by selling digital products!

Of course this is all relative and hypothetical but it’s fun to look at some scenario’s to get an idea of what you can potentially earn with your own digital product business.

Printables:

$10 x 2 copies sold per day = $600 per month.

$15 x 2 copies sold per day = $900 per month.

eBook:

$47 x 1 copy sold per day = $1,410 per month.

$67 x 1 copy sold per day = $2,010 per month.

Online Course:

$297 x 3 copies sold per week = $3,565 per month.

$497 x 3 copies per week = $5,964 per month.

Membership Site:

$25 x 50 members = $1,250 per month recurring.

$47 x 150 members = $7,050 per month recurring.

So as you can see, you can earn $1,000 per month relative easy.

This is what inspires me to keep creating new digital products.

Yes it’s hard work and tedious to create them, but it’s the thought that I only need to create them once and they will sell repeatedly 24/7 with some automated systems and strategic marketing strategies put in place.

What Next?

If you want to test the water with earning passive income by creating and selling digital products, then get my Passive Income Starter Kit.

It gives you a detailed insight on what it entails to create passive income by creating and selling different types of digital products.

You don’t need to create a $997 online course. You can earn a great passive income cash-flow from a simple ebook or set of printables.

The starter kit comprises of three different sections:

Which are the three main components of creating passive income cash-flows.

>> Learn more about the Passive Income Starter Kit here

 

I also have a list of 47 home business ideas for women which you might want to checkout to see if there are any other business ideas which you might want to start alongside creating your digital product.