How to Make Passive Income Online With Digital Products

Pros of selling digital products for passive income

1. Overhead

There are almost no overhead costs. You may need to pay for some small things, like subscription or listing fees, depending on where you’re selling your product.

Otherwise, once the product is created, there’s very little overhead costs compared to physical products that need materials, storage, shipping, fulfillment, and sometimes maintenance.

You have much more control over the profit margins of digital products versus physical products.

2. Reach

You can start selling your digital products to people from all over the world. Owning a physical shop means you’re limited to local customers.

Even if you sell from Amazon, you may be limited to shipping to certain countries and markets. Digital products increase your customer pool significantly.

3. Inventory

You never have to worry about running out of inventory. You won’t have to worry about ordering, making, or shipping new inventory, which can take a long time.

4. One-time creation

You only have to create your product once to sell over and over again.

Types of digital products

• eBooks
• Templates
• Online courses
• Instagram presets
• Stock photos and footage

How to create and sell digital products

The process of creating these products depends on the type of product. If you’re thinking about creating an online course, it’s a relatively simple process.

You have to create a course outline, script, worksheets on Microsoft Word or Google docs to share with students, film and edit the videos, and package them into a video course.

When it comes to creating different templates, Canva is a great tool used by many people. Or you can use Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Word (for resume templates, for example).

Creating stock photos and videos are a bit more technical to create. You will need a good camera and lighting. But if you have a background in photography, this should be a straightforward process.

Outsourcing

You can outsource the creation of your digital products. If you want to create or publish an ebook on Kindle, for example, you don’t have to sit down and write an entire book. You can hire a ghostwriter based on the ideas you share with them.

The same idea can be applied to creating templates. You can hire a graphic designer online to create some templates.

Have a legal agreement when working with someone to create your digital products. The agreement should state that you will reserve the right to that content or products after the freelancer gets paid an agreed amount of money. You always want to protect yourself.

How to promote and sell products

If you’re going to sell templates or digital art, places like Etsy, Creative Market, and Canva are great platforms to get started. You do not need to be a celebrity, influencer, or have a huge audience to get started making money selling digital products.

Having an audience helps, but you don’t need it to be successful. Platforms make it so much easier for your products to get discovered. These platforms already have a huge customer base who will find and purchase your products.

That means you don't have to worry so much about hardcore promotion of your products. You can still promote your products in tandem with what the platforms also do for you.

If you’re selling visual digital products, Pinterest is a great tool to promote your products. You can pin pictures to your products and put them on Pinterest where they might get discovered by others. Those pins can drive traffic to your store or website.

You can also pay for ads on the platforms. You can also collaborate with influencers to promote your digital products. You can also sell your products to your own email list if you have one.

Last bit of advice

There are a lot of videos available on how to create and promote digital products, depending on the type of product you’re trying to sell. I strongly encourage you to create your own digital products.

If you are a small influencer or have a strong social media presence, but you’re not getting a lot of brand deals or not making much on YouTube AdSense, selling your digital products can be a great way to diversify your income and not have to rely on anyone else.

How to make passive income online

If you are thinking of selling digital products for passive income, let me know in the comments what type of products you’re looking to create and sell. I’m always super curious to learn about new digital ideas. Also, let me know if any of these ideas sparked your interest.