Hello friends! Today I’m going to talk about making a passive income by selling digital products on etsy, and other online marketplaces such as creativemarket. At the end of this post, I am also setting myself a challenge! Let’s get started, shall we?
Why Sell Digital Products?
Selling digital products on etsy is a great way to earn a passive income online, some people even make a living from it! The income is obviously not completely passive, due to the fact that you need to actually spend some time to create the product, but don’t let this put you off. Once you have created the product, you can sell it over and over again, as many times as you want, with very little effort. You can even be making sales while you sleep!
How does it work?
Once you have created your first digital product, you simply open a shop on etsy, and list your product. Make sure that it is clearly listed as a digital item, and add lots of good photos so the customer can get a good idea of what you’re selling. You pay around £0.20 to list each item, but the beauty of a digital product is that you can list it once, with a high quantity of the item, so each time it sells, it sends the customer the download of the product, and automatically renews the listing. You don’t have to post anything or keep an inventory- how cool is that??!
Do people actually make money from selling digital products on etsy?
YES!! There have been some great success stories of people selling their digital products on etsy! You can work out roughly what people are making by going to the main page of their etsy store, seeing when they joined etsy, and how many sales they have made within that time. You can then work out the average price of one of their products, and times it by the number of sales they have made. This will give you a rough idea of how much money they are making.
For example; Let’s say a store has been open for 1 year, and they have made 527 sales. The average price of their products is £8, and £8 x 527 sales is £4216. Not bad right?
Some shops such as paperandoats have made a lot more! As of writing this post, paperandoats has made 6720 sales since 2011. The average price of one of their products is £16, so 16 x 6720 is £107,520.
WOW!
That’s a HUGE amount of money for digital products!
What kind of digital products can I sell?
Some ideas of downloadable digital products to sell on etsy are:
- Day Planner
- Meal Planner
- Budget planner
- Wedding Planning kit
- Printable Invitations (baby shower, wedding, birthday party)
- Business card templates
- Resume /CV Templates
- Ready made blog headers
- Styled stock photography
- Fonts
- Clipart
- Knitting patterns
- Dress patterns
- e-book
- Premade logos
I’m sure there are a lot more, but that’s already loads of ideas to get you started!
Join me in my 30 Day Passive Income Challenge
Well, I don’t know about you, but this all sounds pretty great to me, and I’m going to give it a try. I’m setting myself a 30 day challenge to create and sell some digital products on etsy. I currently have an empty shop, but I will be reporting back to you in 30 days from today with my results, how many products I managed to make, and how many sales I made (if any!)
If you would like to join me then please do! I would love to see your results, and I will feature you in my ‘results’ blog post. Just send me an email to emily.brookes@live.co.uk and we can cheer each other on 🙂
Emily xox