A great way to make passive income from your website is to sell digital products on autopilot. Yes, you heard that right! You can really make money while you sleep by selling your digital products on your website- how cool is that? All you need to get going is a website, which you can build on squarespace or wordpress. For this website I use wordpress, and I LOVE it! It’s so easy to use, and really customisable, so you can pretty much create anything you want on it. (If you haven’t set up a website yet, check out my tutorial to get started)
This post may contain affiliate links- for more information please see my disclosure policy.
What kind of digital products can I sell?
Ideally, you will be selling something that has already been created, so it can be downloaded by the customer straight away to use. A few great examples of digital products you could sell are:
Graphic Design- Fonts, Vectors, premade logos, blog templates and themes, textures
E-Books – Novels, instructional ‘how to’ books, City guides, crafts, spiritual, recipe books, exercise guides, diet guides.
Courses- Pre made self study courses on any topic you are knowledgeable about, languages, design, health and more.
Photography- Stock photos, product mock ups, styled stock photography. Take a look on Creative Market to see the kinds of photography people are buying and selling online.
Audio- Audio books, guided meditations and visualisations.
Videos- Video training guides.
Craft Tutorials- Sewing and knitting patterns, building instructions and plans.
How to get started
To sell digital products online you will need:
- A website (check out my easy tutorial to get started) If you really don’t want a website, you can still sell via social media or an email list.
- A SendOwl Account
- A payment gateway such as PayPal, Stripe. Apple Pay or Shopify. I use Paypal for pretty much everything, its so secure and easy to use, and almost everyone has used it at some point.
Once you have signed up to SendOwl, you are ready to get started. You can add the SendOwl Payment button to any products from the Product page on your website, or to your social media posts. Once the customer clicks the button to pay, they will pay through the SendOwl payment system. After this, the product will automatically be delivered to them by SendOwl. Easy Peasy!
Making Your First Sales
If you have a large following on social media, then this is a great place to start. You can also use Facebook ads to drive traffic to your website and increase sales.
Building your email list- You could consider offering a freebie as an incentive or ‘lead magnet’ to get people to sign up to your list (like the one on this website). Once they have signed up, you can email them with news and let them know when you have special offers and new products.
Affiliates- Selling your digital products through affiliates is an amazing way to increase your revenue. SendOwl allows you to create an affiliate program for your products, so once you have that set up you can find people to promote your products for you in exchange for a commission (usually 20% – 50% for digital products) This sounds like a lot of commission at first, but think about it like this: You have already created the products, so it requires no extra work on your part. Someone else will be doing the hard work selling the products for you, which means that you can sit back and relax! You could even be on holiday and still make sales because of your affiliates!
I hope you have found this useful, please let me know in the comments if you have any questions or anything to add!
Emily xox