How To Make Money From Digital Assets
Selling digital products is a low-cost, low-hassle way to open up a new acquirement stream. Whether that stream is a trickle or a torrent volition depend on how much time you invest, the quality of your products, and how well y'all promote them.
You may have hopes of making it large, or maybe you merely desire a passive income stream that tin can grow to eventually replace your job.
Any your reasons are, diversifying your revenue—and finding new ways to earn from domicile—is a smart move. All-time of all, y'all get a chance to put your cognition and talent to work helping others.
This article should give you an idea of the best digital products that you can sell online in 2022, and where y'all can sell them.
Here's what we'll cover:
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- What is a digital product?
- Why sell digital products?
- Digital Product Ideas
- eBooks
- Online courses
- Memberships
- Graphic design piece of work
- Templates
- Craft patterns and downloadable prints
- Music and sound
- Stock photography
- NFTs
- Software and games
- Where to sell digital products online
- Selling digital products on Amazon
- Selling digital products on Etsy
- Selling digital products on Shopify
- Selling through an online marketplace
- Selling through an online class and membership platform
- Promoting your digital products
Simply, before nosotros review the best digital items and where to sell them, a quick overview.
What is a digital product?
Digital Products are any virtual particular you can pay for, and download instantly. They are intangible, in the sense that you can't touch them. But they accept value—to the tune of a projected $331 billion industry in 2022 .
Streaming movies and TV, video games, software, and apps—those are the big hitters, and they're the first things you might think of when you hear "digital products."
But at that place are lots of other ways you can create digital products from your own knowledge, creativity, skills and expertise – and yous don't need a film crew or a squad of software developers to do it.
Why sell digital products?
Creating, marketing, and selling digital products may seem overwhelming, especially if you're not the most tech-literate person on the planet. Simply thanks to online tools like Etsy , Shopify , and Thinkific , the learning bend can exist surprisingly short.
Plus, there are a lot of skilful reasons to sell digital products online:
Low investment, (potentially) loftier returns
There are plenty of digital items you can put together using only fourth dimension, energy, and a little focus. Online marketplaces and e-commerce tools are relatively cheap, compared to renting a brick-and-mortar location or building a physical inventory. This ways the potential for higher profit margins.
More profitable than physical appurtenances
Digital products sell at college margins than physical products. And that margin improves over fourth dimension because yous don't need to spend whatever coin producing more units.
No inventory, aircraft or rent hassle
Besides the fact that you don't have to cover the cost of producing, storing, or shipping concrete items, you tin also avoid the logistics. Selling digital products through an online platform has the potential to be radically elementary—which is why information technology's an ideal side hustle.
Automatic delivery for passive income
If yous've already got a day job keeping you decorated, the digital products yous sell online can proceed money coming in even if most of your week is spent at your full-time gig.
Serve a niche at calibration
Sometimes, it helps to be good at something obscure. Honing in on a specific audition, with specific needs is easier than competing broadly.
Lots of people want shredded abs in xxx days. A much smaller minority wants the perfect physique for water polo. That's called serving a niche.
The challenge with selling niches locally is at that place oft isn't a big plenty market place to sell to. Just even the smallest niches are large plenty to serve globally with no geographic boundaries limiting who you can sell to.
Leverage the shift towards online education
With more businesses shifting online, the demand for digital products continues to grow, with t he demand for online courses was estimated to reach $319+ bn by 2025.
And adoption is accelerating—our report on the bear on COVID-xix had on the online course industry institute a 217% increase in pupil enrollment in online courses in the second one-half of March 2020, as COVID social distancing measures came into play. Now that nosotros're coming out of COVID, the need for online courses is here to stay!
21 digital product ideas to sell online
In that location are hundreds of different digital products you lot can sell online. Rather than list each 1, here are 8 digital product categories to embrace them all—and some inspiration to get you lot started.
ebooks
You don't demand to be the world's greatest novelist to write a volume thousands will buy. Recall nigh what you practise best, and how you tin teach it to others, in writing.
For instance, Tiffany "The Budgetnista" Aliche is a fiscal educator with the goal of empowering women worldwide. She runs a popular online school, the Live Richer Academy . But on meridian of that, Aliche has published a number of successful ebooks for students and not-students alike.
Online courses
Teaching online lets you lot plow something you already have—your expertise—into a new source of acquirement. If yous accept the expertise, and a passion for sharing it with the globe, then an online class is the perfect digital product for you to sell.
People are eager to learn from home, whether they desire to learn a new hobby, or advance themselves professionally—you can serve them by launching a digital course.
The appeal of creating online courses isn't just limited to traditional classroom environments like high school and university, or corporate trainers adapting with remote onboarding… And you don't need to be formally trained as an educator either.
You can create an online class to teach people just almost anything — from tai chi and drone piloting online to yoga , and guitar .
After quarantine measures came into identify and more people constitute themselves at abode , sourdough bread went viral. People were staying domicile, had time off, and wanted to acquire a tangible skill. For weeks, social media was flooded with photos of beautiful and not-so-beautiful abode-baked loaves.
Puff School of Pastry responded to the sourdough trend by offer a free six-part video guide to making sourdough in lockdown every bit a mode to create value while also getting in front of new prospective students (and hopefully, sell more courses).
And now that we're coming out of COVID-19 and the world has gotten used to online courses, the demand for online courses is hither to stay.
Here are some other areas of expertise that nosotros've seen translate into profitable online course businesses, to give some ideas of what yous tin teach:
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- Sewing
- Yoga classes
- Laughter yoga
- Guitar lessons
- Meditation
- Dance classes
- Juggling
- Resumes and Job search
- Professional person evolution
- Arts and Crafts
- Photography
- Copywriting
- Graphic Blueprint
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For more on how to create and sell digital products online, and the kickoff steps to creating a form to sell alongside a physical product, cheque out this video!
Want to build a digital product business organization selling online courses, simply not sure where to showtime? Get free training and starting time building for free!
Memberships
If your goal is to build recurring acquirement by building and serving a community on an ongoing basis, then a membership is the perfect digital product for you to sell.
Whether you programme on selling a series of online courses, or simply charge members for the ability to selection your brain, a membership site can help you build up a monthly revenue stream.
Membership sites aren't merely geared towards ane specific blazon of business. As you can see from these membership site examples , anyone with niche expertise and a passion for sharing it with the world can create one.
With a paid community membership , students get the take a chance to participate in sectional discussion groups, workshops, and Q&A sessions. And when they subscribe, they add to a steady, anticipated stream of income for y'all, their teacher.
In improver to offer standalone yoga classes geared towards a range of skill levels, Lasater Yoga has bridged the gap between online courses and membership sites by offering personalized mentorship through their monthly part hours calls. You can purchase any of their classes, but for $19 per month, you get the total experience and the opportunity to appoint the experts.
Graphic blueprint work
If you're a graphic designer, you lot already have the tools you need to create digital items that sell.
That's because other designers, some of them on tight deadlines, are looking for the elements they need to make their work smooth.
Vector icons, textures, objects, typefaces—in that location's a whole range of digital products y'all can create and sell on the side while you lot work 24-hour interval-to-twenty-four hours with clients. If you have a passion for pattern, it can be a chance to permit your creativity shine outside of a client's projection.
For case, Iuliia Mazur is a professional graphic designer based in Ukraine who sells popular clip art packs on the side. By selling her designs on Creativemarket.com, she can generate passive income and leads for her freelance consulting concern.
Templates
There'due south a world of people who want a head commencement on whatsoever it is that they're working on—from WordPress bloggers to newlyweds.
Why reinvent the wheel? A template can relieve someone the endeavor of designing a website from scratch. It can also help them go their wedding invitations sent out on time, create personalized business cards, plan their marketing strategy, crunch some numbers on excel, or smooth their resume in a pinch.
For instance, designer Janna Hagan fabricated over $5,000 just selling resume templates during a period between jobs. Obviously, non everyone is going to have the same level of success—only reading Jana'due south story may inspire yous to get-go your own venture.
Other templates you tin sell include:
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- Business concern planning templates
- Marketing strategy templates
- Excel templates
- Google Data Studio Analytics templates
- Business organization contracts
- Canva Templates
- WordPress themes
- DIY home projection blueprints
- Powerpoint presentations
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Craft patterns and downloadable prints
If yous determine to sell on Etsy, you'll exist marketing your digital products to a captive audience of 46 million, many of whom joined the site considering they love crafting and DIY projects. There's a huge market for patterns—for sewing, knitting, macrame, papercraft, and just most any project yous can imagine.
On acme of that, there's the printable market: whether you offer coloring pages, kids' workbooks, posters, or birthday cards, someone out in that location is looking for them. For instance, Lena Miramar 's summery printable posters are a huge hit, and she'due south built a concern out of selling the digital files.
Music and audio
The hills are alive with the sound of music. Or the internet is, at least. Podcasters, YouTubers, bedroom pop stars, pic producers, marketing teams—they all utilize sound in one form or another, and they're all in the market for that special element to brand their work stand up out.
Examples of audio products include:
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- Beats and musical instrument samples
- Plugins for music software
- Stock music
- Sound effects
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For instance, Mattia Cellotto is a digital audio producer who sells recordings of everything from trained animals to vintage lab equipment.
Stock photography
Stock photos get a bad rep. We're all familiar with the cliché: a model, awkwardly posed, performing some indecipherable activity against a stark white groundwork. Or better yet—viral sensation, Hide the Hurting Harold.
All the same, beautiful stock photography does exist—just check Unsplash for inspiration. If you have an eye for light, color, and framing, selling your photos online tin can supply yous with a steady side income.
Another choice is to requite away stock photos for complimentary in order to promote other products. For case, self-described "hobbyist lensman" Annie Spratt shares complimentary photos on Unsplash . But she also sells photo rights online. Customers can buy full commercial licenses on a per-photograph basis, which allows them to legally create and sell prints of the work.
NFTs
NFTs refer to non-fungible tokens. A newer part of the cryptocurrency world, NFTs are part of the Ethereum cryptocurrency blockchain. However, they store extra information that make them a scrap unlike than an Ethereum coin. This commodity explains NFTs in elementary terms very clearly.
Getting into NFTs is definitely a riskier pick than other digital products on this list, every bit there is not much known about the longevity of the market. At that place are also no guarantees on how much an NFT you choose to sell will be worth.
NFTs could exist a expert option for you if you are already creating digital art. While NFTs can technically be anything digital, virtually hype is currently around selling digital art. There are a number of marketplaces you tin can utilize to buy and sell NFTs. Some of the marketplaces (such as OpenSea) make the procedure of creating your ain NFTs user-friendly.
Software and games
It's no secret there is a large market for both software and digital games in 2022. While both of these digital products require coding knowledge to create, for those that do have a evolution background they tin be immensely lucrative. If you're interested in getting into the software or gaming market and don't have the technical skill to build a product yourself, consider working with someone who does.
Software can be any solution or software that is powered by lawmaking. This includes mobile apps, spider web apps, desktop software, and many other options. The divergence in effort between a bones mobile game for example vs. complex bookkeeping software is something to accept into account when scoping out what kind of software you would similar to sell. Smaller niche software offerings may be a faster route to making money.
The indie gaming market place has also exploded in the final few years, with platforms like Steam allowing developers to sell directly to gamers without large studio interference. Games like Hollow Knight and Among Us both have indie roots and have exploded in popularity. While creating a digital game is undoubtedly a large fourth dimension commitment, the payoffs can be major.
Where to sell digital products online
Yous should be ready to choose a digital selling platform based on what you program to sell, also equally your upkeep.
Other factors to take into business relationship include ease of employ, and how much control y'all take over the appearance of your store.
It's important to recognize the difference between a market place and your digital storefront.
Selling through your own site
Ecommerce platforms like Shopify and Thinkific charge you for the ability to create your own digital storefront customized with your own branding — without taking half of your profits or displaying a competitor'due south production on your listings.
Yous cull exactly how much you desire to charge, and exactly what your site looks similar.
| Platform Basics | Useful Features |
| Shopify Best for: Ecommerce Cost: Starting at $29 per month USD. No transaction fees using Shopify payments, 0.v – 2% fees for external payment processing. |
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| Thinkific All-time for: Online courses, membership sites, and online communities. Cost: Gratis program includes all core features. Afterwards that, monthly prices start at $99 per month. No transaction fees. |
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Selling through marketplaces
Marketplaces similar Amazon, Skillshare, and Udemy volition take a big cut of your profits in exchange for the consumers they bring you. You don't have any command over the branding, and it's their logo on the site, not yours. When someone views your listings, they'll likewise encounter your competitor's products.
Marketplaces should be viewed every bit a marketing channel to complement your storefront because they are a great mode to generate leads that you tin drive to your ain online store for larger purchases and subscriptions.
Related: How to Sell Digital Products on Amazon
| Platform Basics | Useful Features |
| Etsy All-time for: Downloadable prints, craft designs, and how-to guides. Cost: $0.xx for a iv-month listing, plus five% of each sale |
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| Amazon Best for: eBooks, music, or art. Cost: The private plan costs $0.99 per unit sold, and the professional person plan costs $39.99 per month no matter how many units you sell. |
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| Skillshare Best for: Online courses Cost: You are paid a relatively small-scale royalty for the number of minutes students watch your courses (virtually $200/ month for first-fourth dimension producers). |
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| Udemy All-time for: Online courses Cost: Revenue share (50% of revenue goes to Udemy for being listed in their market). |
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Read More:
- Online Course Marketplaces vs. Self-Hosted LMS
- Summit 6 Best Udemy Alternatives
New platforms for selling digital products seem to popular up every mean solar day. Below, y'all'll observe 6 tried-and-true manufacture standards, and how they're used.
Selling digital products on Amazon
As one of the Big Five tech companies , Amazon seems like a natural first choice for getting your product out into the world. Merely how well does information technology work with digital products?
While Amazon lets you sell music and videos, the service was originally designed for physical products. For digital items, you can find more than robust, easier to use solutions tailored to what you lot're selling for a lower price.
Where Amazon shines, though, is ebook sales. In 2019, 83% of independently published ebooks (books without ISBNs) were sold through Amazon, and they claimed 47% of ebook sales overall.
More than market share, Amazon boasts an easy-to-use publishing platform, Kindle Straight Publishing (KDP) . If you're simply testing the waters, KDP could be a peachy intro to online publishing. As writer Biron Clark explains, formatting your Kindle ebook is equally simple every bit uploading a Word document.
If you're selling other products as well books—such equally classes or workshops—Amazon isn't a one-terminate solution. But Amazon's proposition algorithms make this market place a smashing source of sensation for other products you may be selling
Selling digital products on Etsy
With more than than 46 1000000 active users , and xv years dominating the market place, Etsy is the go-to online service for craftspeople, artists, and vintage sellers.
It can also be an excellent place to sell digital products. For example, a search of " sewing pattern pdf " brings up over 400,000 results. Not only does Etsy brand it piece of cake to upload and sell craft guides, it exposes you lot to a huge marketplace of crafters and DIYers—some of whom are bound to fit your niche. Instead of selling someone a poster, you can sell them a downloadable print .
Etsy is more suited to digital publications whose value lies in their visuals. Amazon's Kindle has graphics support, but y'all won't find many coloring books or clipart collections in that format. For visually rich items, and the people who want to buy them, Etsy is your all-time selection.
On the other paw, Etsy's features for selling audio or video items aren't robust. If those are going to be the bread and butter of your business concern, yous're better off going a unlike road.
Etsy is sort of like a market, that gives you the pick to open your own e-commerce storefront. If you'd like to take your ain site on meridian of Etsy'southward marketplace, Pattern lets you design and launch a split up, non-Etsy-branded website. Your Etsy shop will still exist, and automatically sync with your Pattern site. Simply yous'll accept the take chances to do your own branding, with your own domain.
Selling digital products on Shopify
Shopify has apace become 1 of the well-nigh pop e-commerce sites in the earth, but people aren't just selling physical products on Shopify.
Their Digital Downloads plugin allows you to offer digital products in your store. When someone purchases a digital product from you on Shopify, they tin can download the product immediately, and receive a link to download in their electronic mail.
You tin can even add online courses built on Thinkific to your Shopify shop, which ways that y'all tin sell other products aslope your course, similar a physical copy of your book, an ebook, templates, merchandise, bonus report guides, and whatever else you lot desire.
Selling through an online course marketplace – Udemy & Skillshare
Because Udemy and Skillshare are online class marketplaces for students looking for online courses, these platforms are a great fashion to generate awareness.
But there's a catch…
You'd have to sell a lot of courses on these platforms to make a profit because of their profit sharing and royalty schemes, likewise as limits on the price you lot tin can accuse.
Udemy
There's no fee to host a grade on Udemy, and you lot can publish equally many courses equally you lot like. The catch is, Udemy will go on upward betwixt 50% – 75% of your revenue in substitution for driving visitors to your courses.
Skillshare
Skillshare operates under a subscription model, which ways students pay a recurring fee for unlimited access to the entire catalog of premium classes. Teachers are paid out from a royalty pool based on the number of minutes their courses were watched past premium members.
Equally you can see, information technology's best to view these marketplaces as a atomic number 82 generation source that drives people dorsum to your own online course platform for larger purchases and recurring revenue.
Selling with an online course and membership platform – Thinkific
(Hey— that's u.s.a.! )
If you're set up to create and sell online courses, and you want to keep all of the acquirement for yourself, Thinkific should be the first identify you look. Thinkific is designed for independent instructors who want to teach what they know, rather than spend time learning a new software platform.
Since Thinkific provides the tools to create your digital storefront, yous accept complete command over how much y'all charge, and the design of your site.
Information technology'south a great way to take one pace beyond ebooks. If you've already had some success selling your volume online, Thinkific lets you take that data and plow it into a rich, feature-filled online learning feel. Get started with our guide on how to transform your book into an online grade .
Yous tin take a full tour of Thinkific'south cadre features by signing up for costless . Since the trial has no death, you tin can create and sell 1 course with 1000 students on Thinkific for free.
Promoting your digital products
In that location are a number of unlike ways to promote your digital products, and what works the all-time will depend greatly on the platform yous are selling on, and what you're actually selling. However, at that place are some principles to keep in listen across the board.
Don't rely on your called platform to market your products. For example, if you decide to sell on Etsy or Amazon, you tin't expect to gain large amounts of traffic only for existing on these marketplaces. Build audiences for your products through social media platforms like Instagram or TikTok. If you're stuck for ideas pay attention to the nigh popular content and emulate those posts.
Once you commencement to see some growth effort networking with other digital product creators in your space. This will help you build connections, become tips, and open up opportunities to cross-promote. If budget allows, endeavour out a few paid advertisements on social media or on your selling platform if the platform supports ads. Exam some different ideas and pay attention to what converts the most people to buy your product.
Read more than: 58 Ways to Market your Online Course and Increment Sales in 2022
Decision
Merely past researching digital products, you've taken the first footstep. You know what you're good at, so hopefully, yous've got a few digital product ideas to sell.
The next best thing you can do is to get started!
We're doubling down on our delivery to make selling cognition commerce digital products easy!
Get free training and start building your course for free!
This post was originally published in 2020 and refreshed May 2022 to be fifty-fifty more usefuful.
Source: https://www.thinkific.com/blog/digital-products-to-sell/
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