Passive Income Through Digital Products: Worth It?
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Ever wondered how much money people REALLY make selling digital products?
Yes, there are some pretty impressive success stories online…but is it realistic to that you can achieve the same result? 🤔
Entrepreneurs tend to share their highlight reels instead of the whole story.
As someone who has been in the business for nearly a decade, I want to share some hidden truths of the industry.
Today, I'm sharing some eye-opening revenue numbers and hard-earned lessons from my 8 years in the digital product game.
Plus, I'll give you some honest advice on whether it's even worth your time and effort to get into this business.
And if you're undecided on which digital product idea is worth it, keep reading cause I've got tons of proven ideas for you. 📋
How Much Money Can You Make Selling Digital Products?
First, lets take a look at whether these products actually sell. Then we can decide if they are worth the effort of doing so.
After scouring the internet for the public numbers on a variety of different digital product types, here's what I found:
1. Online Courses
Amy Porterfield shared on the Cubicle to CEO podcast about her recent $7.5M course launch. 💵
Okay, Amy is obviously at the top of her game but courses making millions is not THAT unusual of an occurrence:
Tiago Forte, on the Billion Dollar Creator podcast, revealed he makes $2M - $3M annually from courses. 🧑🏫
2. Memberships
Melissa Wood Health has 92,000 members at $14.95/month, totaling $1.3M/month or $16.5M/year.
📈 Check out this Harvard Business School publication to read all the details!
Curous what her membership entails? Videos, audio, and written content related to health.
3. Wedding Signage & Invitation Templates
Blush Paperie Shop has an Etsy & E-commerce store that collectively have made over 134,067 sales, averaging $14.42 per sale (that’s an estimate), totaling $1.93M since 2017. 💌
4. Website Templates
BigCatCreative is a fabulous website template shop. They share on their site that they have sold over 7,000 templates at an average of $297, totaling just over $2M. 🖥️
Tonic Site Shop is another website template success story. They have served over 10,000 customers at an estimated average order price of $1,100, they are totaling at $11M.
5. Legal Templates
The Contract Shop has sold over 5,000 templates at $400 each (average estimated purchase price), totaling $2M.
By the way, if you’re looking for product ideas, there are 5 of them right there! 👆
Here’s my full list of digital product ideas:
Online courses
Memberships
Wedding signage & invitation templates
Website templates
Legal templates
Copy templates
Font licenses
Stock photos
Calculators & Spreadsheets
Branding templates
Party game printables
Lightroom presets
Notion templates
So, do these digital products make money?
Yes!
But are they worth doing?
Well, maybe. 🤔
These are the stories of HIGHLY successful digital product sellers. How realistic is it that you’ll actually build something like that yourself?
Let’s look a little bit closer….
What do all these digital shop success stories have in common?
What’s the one thing that they ALL have that took them years to build?
What is the ONE thing that is the foundation of their business & without which they would sell nothing?
The Secret to Success: Building an Audience 📣
That’s right - the common thread among all these success stories is an audience. Building an audience is honestly half the battle. Without an audience, your digital products simply won't sell so this is a non-negotiable for success in this field.
So, Is It Even Worth the Effort? 🧐
If you're not willing to put effort into audience building, then honestly, no.
Creating a product with no one to sell it to is a waste of time.
But don't throw in the towel just yet. Building an audience is not impossible, and we have a massive advantage, or “secret weapon” available to all of us, no matter our budget or connections.
Your Secret Weapon: Leverage 📚
I recently read an incredible book, The Almanac of Naval Ravikant, which talks about leverage. According to the author Eric Jorgenson, these are the three broad categories of leverage:
Labor:
Other humans working for you. It's the oldest form of leverage but actually not a great one. Why? because managing other people can be complicated and requires tremendous leadership skills.
Money:
Take a look at the richest people: bankers, politicians in corrupt countries… essentially people who move large amounts of money around. If you get good at managing capital, you can manage more of it easier than managing more people. So this form of leverage is about managing large amounts of money, which scales very well.
Products with No Marginal Cost of Replication:
This is the most democratic of the three categories. We’re talking about things like books and media.
In the past, we were only able to reach certain groups of people but new forms of leverage (podcasts, tweets, youtube) are changing this.
Especially because they do not require anyone else’s permission. Even if you do not have money to manage OR people to work for you, you still have media aka content creation. THIS is actually the most effective and easy to access form of leverage that any of us has.
Content creation is the most effective and easiest-to-access form of leverage any of us have.
Join My Masterclass! 🎓
Next week, I'm hosting a 90-minute masterclass on How to Grow an Email List of Buyers (Without spending a second on social or a cent on ads).
We'll be covering:
The pros & cons of common marketing strategies
Shocking secret Instagram following to revenue numbers that will make your jawl hit the floor
The Backwards Content Strategy: What it is & why it's the secret weapon to online sales
So so much more! 🎉
I only host this specific training once a year, and it's happening live.
So, if you're lucky enough to be reading this before the event, register ASAP! I can't wait to see you there! 👇
