There’s a lot of passive income to be made by selling digital products online. In this article, we will discuss different types of digital products you can sell online and make money.
Read: How to make Passive Income Online Selling Physical Products.
How to Make Passive Income Online Selling Digital Products
Website/Domain selling ( aka Domain Flipping )
The selling of websites is a common way to make money online. These can be websites that you have created from scratch or websites that you have bought and modified. To sell your websites, you will need a flipping site. To get potential clients to purchase your websites, you need to sign up with a flipping site. One of the most popular flipping sites is Flippa.com
Online Courses
You can create online courses on something that you are knowledgeable about and sell them through one of the many online schools like Udemy and SkillShare.
Blogging
Blogging is another popular way of making passive income. You earn money from a blog by monetizing it. Monetizing can be done through affiliate marketing, direct advertising, or third-party advertising.
In order to run a successful blog, you will need to:
- Focus on quality rather than quantity
- Optimize your blog for search engines
- Promote your blog
- Enable comments
- Keep it simple
- Maintain a posting schedule
- Use multimedia
- Enable ease of sharing of posts by your visitors
You do not have to write the articles for the blog yourself. You can outsource that to freelance writers. There are platforms that are available for you to source freelance writers from. The most popular ones are Airtasker, Upwork, Fiverr, and Freelancer. You can also use Craig’s List and LinkedIn. The higher the quality of your articles, the higher the number of visitors your blog will get. More traffic means more income.
Nowadays, starting a blog is rather easy as there are so many tools to help you create a blog in just a few minutes. Yes, a few minutes.
One such tool/platform is WordPress which you can download from here. You will need to pay for a hosting service. There’s a wide range of WordPress hosting companies to choose from. Some of them like, TrueHost, offer a free SSL certificate with every hosting package. Other worldwide hosting companies are Bluehost, HostGator, a2Hosting, and SiteGround.
Another platform for blogging is Blogger. It is quite easy to start a blog using Blogger and you can get started within minutes. Some good examples of blogs that make a lot of money are The Greatist and Nerd Wallet.
Vlogging (Making YOUTUBE videos)
Making YouTube videos is another very popular way of making passive income. There are three main ways in which people make money from creating YouTube videos.
- Google AdSense – All you need to do is create an account with AdSense and you can link your AdSense account to your YouTube account.
- Promoting products and Services in videos – This involves advertising products and services inside your videos
- Promoting products and services in the description – This involves advertising products and services by adding links to those products in the description box of your videos.
The videos will keep making money as long as they are online.
Podcasts
A podcast is like an online version of radio. If you have something interesting to talk to people about, a podcast would be a great way to make passive income. Below, I’ve put together some of the most popular platforms for hosting a podcast…
Building Apps and software
Smartphones have become very popular and people are using them to handle day-to-day tasks. If you have knowledge on how to create apps for these smartphones, there is money to be made from that. Even if you don’t have knowledge on how to create the apps, all you need is a good idea for an app and you can hire developers to create the app for you. I’m sure you have heard of people who made a lot of money from just one app.
Selling E-books
If done in the right way, selling e-books can be a very good source of passive income. Once you have already published a book and it is online, it will keep selling for years to come. This is a highly competitive market and you will need outstanding content to make good money from it. New technology has made it easier for writers to write, edit and self-publish their own books. There are various online book stores that will list and sell the eBook for you with no upfront fees. You just have to pay a commission on the sales and they will handle everything including marketing sales and book distribution. You’ll also be free to market it on any other platform.
One such platform is the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. Amazon is the best choice as they are the biggest online eBook retailer, accounting for about 3/4 of all eBook sales on their website. They will give you 70% of the royalties. The only problem is that they do not disclose emails of the purchasers so you can not include them on your mailing list for updates and future sales.
You can also sell the books on your own website. If you do not have a website, contact Lituptech Consultants for the best offers.
Selling stock images
If you have photography skills, you can earn from your photographs by listing them on Stock Photography sites. Stock photography sites are eCommerce platforms where you can upload high-resolution photos and have people use them for a fee. If someone or a company wants to use your photo on a billboard, magazine, advert, etc, they can use it once or severally, depending on the agreement, for a fee. You earn a royalty from their transaction and still own the photo so you other people can use it as well. You will earn a royalty every time a customer downloads your photo.
There are many stock photography websites you can use. I’ll list some of the most popular ones for you below;
- Shutterstock – Just navigate to the ‘start selling’ page, open an account if you don’t have one already and once you are verified, You can upload content and start earning.
- Dreamstime – Once you have opened an account with Dreamstime, you can upload and sell your images.
- Fotolia – Also known as ‘Adobe Stock’, On the top right, you will the option ‘Sell Images’. Create an account and start selling images. You take a 33 percent commission on each photo sold and need a payment threshold of 25 dollars to request payment.
- Freepik – Go to ‘Become a contributor’ and just like with the others, create an account and start uploading images.
- Videoblocks – Create an account, make and upload good videos and earn royalties from them every time they are used.
Selling stock videos
Similar to stock images, You can also sell or get royalties from uploading your videos to stock video sites. You just need to have good content creation skills. Some of the most popular platforms are also in the ‘Selling stock images section above so I’m not going to repeat them here.
Music licensing
This is also referred to as selling stock music. The business model is the same as with selling stock images and videos. You still retain the rights to your music. People pay you for the privilege of using your music.
I hope you found this article useful. Check out More Finance Articles Here.
