I wanted to share with you a little something I’m working on at the moment to make some extra income. That is the creation of my own digital products that I can sell easily and quickly.
The reason creating digital products appeals to me is that once the work is done i.e. I’ve created the product once, it could sell over and over again with very little input from me. Digital products can certainly be a great form of passive income!
When you think of digital products, you might think about apps, learning programs or tutorials or some other kind of software that you can sell via your blog or Clickbank for example. But I’m not at that level yet so this post isn’t about those kind of products! I’m thinking more of digital products which I can create myself using the skills I have right now and sell them via an online marketplace.
I already have one digital product that you probably know about which is my “Achieving Debt Freedom” eBook (currently available on Amazon). It’s a great feeling logging into my KDP Amazon dashboard and finding another sale. This book isn’t going to make me rich overnight or anything but it’s very nice knowing that someone might be buying my book whilst I’m working on other things.
Using online marketplaces like eBay
If you’re a practiced eBayer, you’ll know that listing products on eBay to sell can be very time consuming. Then there’s the time and cost involved in packaging and posting your items afterwards. The hassle factor as I like to call it.
I’ve sold a lot of different things on eBay over the last few years. I’ve even had an attempt at running an eBay shop before and managed to make a little money by flipping products – buying them when they were on offer and selling them for the usual retail price afterwards when they were no longer cheap to buy.
My shop did make a profit but it took up a lot of my time researching the right products, looking out for deals and then all the admin involved in listing the products, dealing with buyers and then finally getting the products dispatched. In the end, I got bored and wrongly or rightly, I gave it up…
Digital products on eBay
I’ve noticed a lot of people selling digital products or services on eBay recently. Services like logo design, full website design and even CV rewriting can be purchased on eBay and involve no postage costs whatsoever. Then there are tons of template based products available which can be emailed out to buyers the same day.
So I began thinking about digital products I could create and sell which would just involve emailing the final product to the buyer. Not quite passive income since I’d have to push a couple of buttons to complete the transaction, but on the whole, not very time consuming at all.
As part of my day job, I use a few documents for work that I’ve had to put together myself to make my working life a bit easier and more organised. I created them to save me time when doing the planning work I need to do for my job. I decided to create some standard templates from them and sell them on eBay to see if anyone else could make use of them. To my surprise, they could!
I’m currently selling on average a few templates a week listing them for 30 days at a time. I only charge a few pounds for them because at the end of the day they are just word documents! But this has been very easy to do and I definitely want to scale it up by offering more templates along the same kind of lines for a higher price and generating more digital products in niches not related to my work.
Digital product ideas for selling on eBay or Etsy
If you can create apps, that’s great! But in case you’re thinking of creating digital products in the same way that I am, maybe you could make use of some of these ideas which involve different skill sets:
- Blog, Twitter or Facebook ready made headers
- Web graphics such as buttons, borders etc
- Standard logos which just need the company name inserting
- Budget, investment or debt payoff tracker spreadsheets
- CV templates
- eBooks or guides (you could also use Amazon and Barnes and Noble)
- Your own photography which you could sell digitally for the buyer to print themselves
- Craft based patterns or tutorials for knitting, crochet, beadweaving, etc.
If you’re a whizz at PhotoShop, Illustrator, Word or Excel, you could probably create something that you could sell. The trick is creating something useful, where there is a definite need for it and not too much competition. You could find out what kind of products are selling well in different niches using the search tools on eBay, analyze the competition and then work out what you could create yourself!
Have you created any digital products? If so, what are they and how are you getting on with selling them?
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