Passive Income Ideas - Make $10K+ a month from digital products
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Oh hey, fancy seeing you here!
Well, seeing as you stopped by and clicked on this post, I have a few assumptions about you. Tell me if I'm correct….
You're wanting 10K months, dreaming of 10K months, but you're not really willing to sacrifice any more of your life and your time in order to get there.
So what's a girl to do?
Easy!
Create a digital product that can be delivered and serve your clients automatically with no more of your time and effort needed for every sale. But which product should you create?
What will your people actually want to buy from you?
What can you create which won't just be something mostly collecting dust on your website, but something which sells every single day instead of once or twice a month?
Well friend, you clicked on the right post because I'm going to cover all of that today!
First, I'm going to get to the sexy bit, which I know that you're really after right now, and that's all of those digital product ideas.
But don't you go scurrying away part-way through because I'm also going to cover the thing that you really need in order to sell digital products, and this is probably the most important part to make your new venture a success.
So make sure you read this post all the way to the end, because I'm going to share that important bit then! And I would honestly be doing you a disservice if I didn't talk about that.
But without further ado, let's get into it!
The first digital product is so in demand these days, it's probably going to be even more popular than your friend with the Soho House membership.
And like all of those fancy Soho House people, it's the definition of artistic and creative.
Can you guess what it is?
Digital product idea one!
Designer templates, Canva templates, website templates, social media templates, presentation slide templates, brand and logo templates, wedding invitation templates, all of those things.
For your clients, this gets them a designer-created item on a serious budget.
They will have some legwork involved. They need to take your done-for-them template and then input in their own content.
But this is an absolute godsend for any business owner who wants to get a designer look for a fraction of the time and the cost of what it actually takes to work with a designer.
And for you as the designer, this probably honestly isn't so different from the work that you're doing now.
Instead of creating custom work for your clients, you're creating the work that you honestly want to make to your style and then selling it to whoever aligns and feels called by that design.
And of course, there are bonus points if you create a bunch of items that all align.
Think of it like this.
If your customer is an interior designer, they probably need a website and maybe also social media graphics and maybe like some PDF designs and maybe some presentation slides and also a logo.
Of course, to start, you'll probably just create one of these items, but with time, template chops that sell these items often begin creating other design assets which fit already with a template that they've created.
Big Cat Creative did this by first creating website templates and then they created matching social media graphics as well.
TEMPLATES ARE a super easy way to up your revenue per customer and is also genuinely so helpful to your client that they can get everything they want in their business to match.
Now the second digital product is one of the best win-wins I've seen between business owner and customer.
This product, if paid normally to have custom done would easily cost someone like $5,000.
But you can alternatively buy a template for this often for a few hundred or maybe a thousand dollars which means the customer just easily saved 4K and that's equivalent to a week in Mexico - tacos & margaritas anyone?!
So any budget-savvy business owner would be wise to buy it.
What is it?
Clue: It is the thing most new business owners are often the most intimidated by.
Digital product idea two!
Copy Templates!
If you guessed copywriting, you are right.
Now, what kind of copy templates could you offer?
Well, there's things like email-welcome sequence copy templates. I actually sell these myself (check ‘em out here!).
Email scripts for working with clients. I actually give these to my Square Secrets Business™ course students.
There's also things like website copy templates… I've seen a lot of super-savvy copywriters who want to scale-sell these sorts of things. (I actually have a homepage copy-template you can grab for free here! 👇
And then there's the big one I've been asked to sell mine a zillion times now because it's so exceptionally valuable….
And that is sales email copy templates and sales page copy templates.
I've also seen this done by lawyers as legal templates or for those with a skill with coding code snippet templates could also be sold (like these from The Creative Law Shop - get 10% off with my code PAIGE10 (* yep - that’s an affiliate code - my margarita fund thanks you kindly in advance if you choose to use it!).
Now these are all at the end of the day, just words on a document that are sold digitally and can save your customer an unbelievable amount of time.
Sometimes these act as guides and prompts for your customer.
Sometimes they're just fully and completely done and written for them.
Often people think, could I really be paid for writing?
And the truth is, yes, you absolutely can be!
If you align what you're writing with what customers are really struggling with and actually need.
Next up, this digital product gets more bang for your customer's buck than anything they could get from Target.
It is a massive shortcut and is typically sold by those in an industry to those in their same industry.
And it goes well beyond just business owners selling to other business owners.
What is it?
Digital product idea three!
Completely done for you, industry-specific templates!
Now that name might sound generic but let me explain what it actually is.
So if you're a teacher and you just saw on your timetable the next year, you are teaching grade six history and you've never taught grade six history before.
You can either spend weeks and weeks preparing your class plans and maybe resources and the tests that you're gonna give your students…
OR
you could buy it in a done-for-you bundle.
Now this type of thing has been sold even before the internet was a thing.
So my mother-in-law was a teacher and used to buy these on mail order.
And so she'd get a binder with like grade six history plans and resources and worksheets and tests which would be delivered by mail to her house.
Now it's obviously much easier because this can just be sent online instantly.
Teachers Pay Teachers is a prime example of this but what about outside of the actual teaching world?
So I saw a watercolor artist do this too. Jessica from Simply Jessica Marie runs an online shop where she sells things like greeting cards and mugs and coasters and pillows and notebooks and all those sorts of things.
And to find the vendors who would be trustworthy to actually create those products to the high standard that she wanted, it took a lot of research and a lot of time and effort to find the best places to source all of these products from in order to create her final products!
So what she did was she put together what she called the Printing and Productions Partners Guide.
Basically it's a shortcut on the product creation front for any business owner who wants to offer similar products.
I've also seen an interior designer do something similar where they put together a bundle of every single template and resource that they use in the backend of the day-to-day of running their business and they sold it for thousands.
Now in that they included…
their client welcome guide
the inventory tracking sheets that they had created
project presentation slide designs
client email swipe files…
and a ton more items.
So for customers, it is basically the like quick start version which allows them to have all of the assets to start their business created in as little effort as just like one click and a few hundred or few thousand dollars.
Next, this one is perfect for those with big dreams of selling a course, but maybe not the desire to sink the insane amount of time and effort into creating said course or those who want to test a potential course idea.
So what is it?
Digital product idea FOUR!
Educational PDFs!
Basically you take your course idea and you put all the information which you would put into a course into a written PDF.
So it's way faster and easier to produce this than a recorded course.
It's great if you want to kind of like dip your toe into the educational waters.
I also loved something genius I saw the Bucketlist Bombshells do a few years back.
They did a 12-day sale where they sold a new educational PDF every day for 12 days.
And then when I talked to them later about it they actually let me in on something that I thought was so incredibly genius.
They weren't even really trying to make money off of the PDFs!
What they really wanted to do was they wanted to validate future course ideas and they did it from selling those 12 PDFs on 12 totally different topics that they were considering to turn into courses.
And then from whichever PDF sold the most they would turn those into a fully-fledged course!
I also have a friend Emily from the Sleep Chief who is a baby sleep consultant.
And she also sells educational PDFs to parents who are at their wits-end needing to get their baby to sleep but not knowing how to do it. So she has different PDFs for different ages.
She has one for zero to six months, a six to 12 months sleep program, etc….
It's basically all the same idea!
Put all of the information into a PDF
stick it up on your website
add some compelling copy …
and let the thing sell itself!
Okay, the next one is for all of my fellow slackers who slept through high school math class like I did!
Digital product idea Five!
Pre-Made Calculating Sheets!
If you're hopeless with Google sheets and calculations like me, then just buy a pre-made calculating sheet!
So for example, I was trying to calculate wallpaper for a room in our home and I could not for the life of me figure out how much wallpaper I needed…
So if there was a very savvy wallpaper company who knew their customer’s pain points and not being sure if you were buying the correct amount of wallpaper was their pain point, then they could sell a little calculator where you would input the dimensions of the room and then it would shoot out exactly how much of each specific type of wallpaper to buy of sort of the one you're interested in 'cause every single wallpaper seems to be different with their calculation!
I've also seen business owners sell this as stats tracking or finance tracking sheets for the business owners who honestly just don't want the hassle of coming up with the system themselves.
Basically, if there's anything you've ever created, a sheet that auto-calculates something, this could be an option for you!
Digital product idea six!
Reports!
So I took a quiz once, the Strengths Finder quiz and at the end, I got my results and a few lines and description of my results.
But they also had an option to buy the in-depth report of my results, which I think was like 30 bucks and it was a total no-brainer buy for me!
The report was a much more in-depth summary and analysis of my results as well as advice on what I could do with these findings.
And in other industries, I've seen these reports kind of same idea but styled as white papers or trend reports and prediction reports, they're also really popular too.
Digital product idea seven!
Emails and Newsletters!
Believe it or not, newsletters can be incredible income!
So sometimes these newsletters are paid for directly by the subscribers.
Other times you build the list and then a brand pays to sponsor an email and pays for you to include a promo of something for them in the email.
Now, this is a much lesser known digital product but also definitely one of the highest earning if you do it correctly!
Digital product idea eight!
Audios!
And big in the spiritual space is something like audios.
If you have a community that loves your content and guidance and message and philosophy, people will buy audios from you.
Often this comes in the form of meditations or guided visualizations or affirmations, those sorts of things.
So if that's your field, I've seen these be sold anywhere from like $5 to $100.
Now, hopefully, you've picked one of these digital product options and ideas which could work well for you and your business.
And if so, your next problem is going to be, well, who exactly do I sell this thing to?
And if you're thinking about this, congratulations, you are one of the 1% of business owners who think about this before they actually launch their digital product!
Most don't think about this to their own detriment.
So when you go to sell this item, you're going to want people to go to the sales page.
And that means you need traffic to the sales page but not all traffic is created equal!
If you've been around the online space for any amount of time, you will notice that every single successful business owner will tell you to build your email list because email lists convert significantly higher into digital product sales than any other marketing channel.
Email lists are better than social media followers, better than YouTube subscribers, better than ads traffic and all of the rest of the options.
But how exactly do you build an email list?
Well, watch this video next where I will break down how I got to 48,000 opt-ins on my email list.
And it is the vital second piece to making your digital product dreams a success.
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