As an Entrepreneurial Writer, you want to make an ongoing passive income. You can do this with your writing. What writers usually think of is writing books and blogging. But there is so much more out there that you can create. Things that don’t take a long time to do and will continue to bring you income for years to come. I’m talking about digital products.
Why digital products?
Digital products are the easiest products to create. All it takes is a little time and knowledge. You don’t even need any money upfront to create them. This means that it is all 80–90% profit. Even if you price your digital products on the low at $20 or less you will still make quite a bit of money.
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What expenses are there in selling these products?
If you sell them on sites like Etsy it is a good way to build a digital product store. They take a percentage of each sale. Amazon’s KDP is the same.
If you want to sell digital photos and videos you can use places like shutterstock.com. They pay you a certain amount per photo or video.
If you have a membership site like Patreon and substack they have a payment fee and processing fee. They charge you this fee each time they process a payment from one of your subscribers. The site deducts the fees from their payment and you receive the balance.
Then there are fees like marketing ads on Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook. There are editing fees and cover design fees. These fees are not mandatory. If you do all the work yourself you can save the expense.
The downside to this is that it makes more work for you and your marketing efforts will be slower. Unless you have a growing list.
Resources needed to create your digital products.
· Try using canva for making your printables and digital marketing products.
· Word and Excel are great for templates, workbooks, and worksheets.
· You can create an Etsy store to sell your digital products.
· Pixabay and unsplash are great for free photos.
What types of products are there that you can create?
E-books
E-books that can teach and inform are great products to sell. You can put them on Amazon, Smashwords, or even Draft2Digital.
When you create an email course you can automate it to send on autopilot. You do this through your email service provider. All you have to do is write out each of your email lessons and then set up the automation sequence.
Stock Photos
Creating these can be fun if you love taking photos. You can sell them on places like Shutterstock. People always need photos for their blog posts and book covers. So they go to these websites to get one when they need it.
A membership site
By creating a membership you can earn a reliable monthly income from your members. This is a great way to be able to move towards quitting your main job if that is one of your goals.
Another benefit is people will begin to see you as a respected source of information in your niche. The more respected you become, the more followers and members you will earn.
By building this type of site, you are building a community with your members. People usually like being a part of a great community. When they find one they believe in and love being a part of they will tell others. Then those others join and tell others. Word of mouth is a very powerful free marketing tool.
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Email course
When you create an email course you can automate it to send on autopilot. You do this through your email service provider. All you have to do is write out each of your email lessons and then set up the automation sequence.
Then when someone buys your course you start the sequence for them. This can take all 2 minutes and you’re done. Most people who sell email courses use PayPal to process the payments. So it would be a good idea to set up an account with PayPal.
PDF guide
What’s the difference between a PDF guide and an e-book? The number of pages is how I would categorize the difference. E-books are usually at least 26 pages or more. A PDF guide can be 25 pages or less. You can give these away for free or you can sell them at a good price.
When you sell a PDF you don’t have to go through Amazon or anyone else. This means your profit is larger. Someone buys your PDF and you email it right to them yourself. From point A to point B. No middleman. Then it’s 100% profit.
Printables
You can create printable sheets for people to buy and download. These can help people keep track of all different things in their careers and personal lives. Some examples of printables include:
· Budget tracker spreadsheets
· Income tracker spreadsheets
· Worksheets workbooks
· Shopping lists
· Weight tracker spreadsheets
· Calendars
· Lesson plans
· Planner pages
Audiobooks
Audiobooks are not as hard to create as some of the others. You can create them in one of 2 ways. Either way, it is another version of your published books. Here are the two ways you can do this:
· You can record your book audio and create the audiobook yourself.
· You can hire someone else to record the audio. Then you can publish the audio version yourself.
Which option you choose depends on your skills and budget to get the job done. If you want to know more about how to create an audiobook check out this webpage:
Note… I am not an affiliate of this site.
Customizable marketing materials
Customizable marketing materials are great products to create and give away. What are they? Well, there are several different things you can create. for instance:
· Infographics
· Photographs
· Swipe files
· Checklists
· Discount coupon
· Testimonials
· Product or service comparison sheets.
You can use these in your marketing strategies to sell your digital products. Or you can offer to create these products for other business owners. For their marketing campaigns. Or as a third option, you can do both.
You can create these products for other business owners. You can create several or all of these and put them together into a marketing kit(see below). Your clients can use this kit to grow their business and you make money from the sale.
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A kit
A kit is easy to put together if you have several different digital products. What is a kit? A kit is when you combine 2 or more digital products to create a package deal.
For instance, you have 10 digital products and 4 of them are of similar content and you can put them together into a kit. This then gives you 11 different products. 10 different products and one kit with 4 different products bundled together.
Key takeaway:
In this article, I discussed 9 different types of digital products you can create and sell. You may want to create your website or an Etsy store to sell them on. Then you can use PayPal to accept payments. For some of these products, you can earn 100% of profit and some are only a royalty percentage as a profit. But, either way, there is a large potential for earning extra money in this income stream. It is always good to have many income streams. A famous saying has always been:
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket!
So are you ready to spend a weekend or two to create some digital products? Products that you can sell as another income stream? If you are, then have some fun with it. I know you can do it.
So what now?
Go forth and create!
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