Selling Digital Products as a Passive Income Strategy: A Beginners Guide

What is passive income?

Passive income is money that keeps on coming even when you cease to work. You put in hard work at the beginning, build up the income, and reap the benefits forever.

Royalties are a common type of passive income- money received by authors or musicians, for example, or from a patent.

Why digital passive income?

Digital passive income is a good idea because digital products can be sold on the internet. The hardest thing about selling any product is advertising it, but the internet can help with that. There are plenty of outlets for selling digital products- websites where tons of people go every day just to browse and purchase products. So becoming a seller on these sites is a good place to start.

How do you decide what digital products to sell?

You want to follow the laws of supply and demand, and find a digital product  that is highly desired but that doesn’t have too many people already selling it.

For any potential product, do a keyword search for it in your web store of choice and see how many for-sale products pop up. If there are already 42,000 clip art images of the Hunger Games brooch for sale, that’s probably not a bandwagon you want to jump on.

Many shopping websites now have a view count for each individual product, so search for similar products to the one you’d like to sell and make sure a lot of people are looking for and viewing those products. Check out your competitors online stores and see how many sales they’ve made, and look at their their feedback and comments sections.

Think outside the box.

The range of digital files you can sell is large. There are eBooks, stock photography, clip art, unique fonts, printable art supplies, digital cards, games and apps, and even sound effects or music, to name just a few. Go for your strengths, and then find a product that you can make money with.

The more products you have, the more people buy from you.

People are more inclined to make purchases from a seller who has a lot of products and a lot of positive feedback. So build your inventory over time, make the first few sales, and it will get easier from there.

Where can you sell digital products online?

It depends on what you want to sell. For anything artistic, Etsy is a great site to use. Here is my Etsy shop as an example. For stock imagery, there are iStockphoto and Dreamstime. Dafont has tons of customized fonts and you can add your own to sell. If you are making apps and games, you can sell them at the store for the specific console, like the iTunes store. And if you make an eBook, your own blog is a great place to sell. Or, you can publish your own book for free and release it on the Amazon Kindle for sale.

These are just a few examples, it really just depends on what you are selling. Do a google search for the product you’d like to sell to figure out the best places to sell it.

Or, like I’m doing with this site, you can learn to earn a passive income through blogging.

Keep up with trends.

If there is a way for you to work in what is popular, it will bring you an extra boost of potential buyers. It wasnt digital, but I was able to sell a ton of colored feather hair extensions in summer 2011, because they were extremely popular and in fashion. Nobody buys them anymore, though. Now, although I made a joke about it earlier, the Hunger Games are a popular trend in products, as an example.

Keep on truckin

It will be a lot of work at first, to research, build inventory, and get customers. But selling digital files online means you can make money from anywhere in the world, selling files to people from any country, and making money while you sleep.

At first it may not be much, but even the little pocket money I make each month from passive income online makes me feel great, because I literally do no work and will get extra money directly into my bank account every month for the rest of my life. Score!

And that is why I like selling digital products for passive income. Is there anyone out there selling a really unique digital product and making money off of it?