Yet another way to earn income from a website is to build and sell your own digital product. Examples of digital products include:
- Online courses
- E-books
- Downloadable templates
- Custom software
While it takes a bit of work up front to create these products, they can be sold over and over again without any additional work once you’ve created them.
Some examples of digital products that I’ve personally built and sold on Four Pillar Freedom include:
The Excel Genuis Toolkit – This is a collection of 17 Excel worksheets that show how I made the most popular visuals on this blog. Since people emailed me so often asking for the worksheets I used to create some of the visualizations in my posts, I decided to create a massive collection of worksheets that I could simply sell to people.
The Data Scientist Resume Pack – This is a collection of the exact three resumes I used to land various data science jobs. Instead of explaining how to create a resume that will attract data science jobs, I made this product so that people could purchase it and simply see examples of resumes that have landed real jobs.
Elements of Freedom – This is an ebook that encapsulates all of the big ideas that I’ve written about over the course of nearly three years on this blog. I decided to make this as a way to help new readers get up to speed on all of the topics I write about without needing to dig through the hundreds of articles in the archives.
Simple SEO for Bloggers – This is an online course I created that teaches the exact SEO tactics I personally use to grow traffic to websites from scratch.
No matter which niche you’re in, there’s likely an opportunity for you to create some type of digital product that you can sell to readers.
The Economics of Digital Products
The economics of creating and selling digital products is quite appealing as well. Consider the following example:
It took me about 10 total hours to compile The Excel Genius Toolkit – a collection of 17 Excel worksheets. I typically sell around 4 of these each month at a price of $24.99. That’s about $100 in purely passive income.
It’s not a ton of money, but over the course of a year I’ll make about $1,200 from this digital product. Over the course of three years I’ll make about $3,600. All from 10 hours of work. That’s an hourly rate of $360.
Best of all, once I finished creating it I was able to sell the exact same digital copy over and over again without any additional work.
Tools for Selling Digital Products
There are two tools that I’ve found particularly useful for selling specific digital products:
Teachable
Online courses are an excellent digital product to create because you can typically sell them at a premium price ($100+) and require no additional effort from you once you’ve actually published them.
I recommend creating courses on Teachable because they offer a free plan where you can sell the first 10 copies of your course for free. If you’re unable to make at least 10 sales, you didn’t waste any money. And if you do make more than 10 sales, you can simply upgrade your plan to accommodate more students.
In addition, it’s dead simple to create courses on Teachable. Their back-end makes it simple to create courses from scratch, whether you include written tutorials or video tutorials. It’s feasible that you could create an entire course in just a few weeks thanks to their software.
They also handle all billing and payments for you, so literally all you have to think about is how to make the best course possible without worrying about all of the technical details of collecting payments from customers.
Gumroad
For all other digital products like e-books, downloadable templates, PDFs, paid videos etc. I recommend using Gumroad. It’s a service that allows you to upload digital products and sell them directly on your site using a simple HTML code that Gumroad provides for you.
Similar to Teachable, Gumroad offers a free plan where you can sell your digital products without paying a monthly fee. They take about 5% of your sales unless you upgrade to a $10 monthly plan, in which they only take about 3.5% of sales.
Full Disclosure: Nothing on this site should ever be considered to be advice, research or an invitation to buy or sell any securities, please see my Terms & Conditions page for a full disclaimer.
