Profitable Digital Products for Building Passive Income Online
There are so many different types of digital products to sell online it can be hard to know which ones actually have real potential to break through and be profitable. The research has been done to identify the top seven digital products to sell online this year.
All seven of these digital product types can bring in passive income, which means that the product is created once and then set up to sell on autopilot, so there is no need to store any inventory and no more active work required as orders come in to fill and ship those orders.
Creating and Selling Profitable Canva Templates
Benefits of Pre-Made Design Assets
It all happens based on an automated system, which is why digital products are so amazing. Passive digital products are an incredible way to make money online with limited time and budget available. One of the very best digital products you can sell online this year is a Canva template.
People are more and more looking for templates for things because they don’t want to have to start their design from scratch. They want to just make a few edits here and there to make it their own, make what they want, and save a lot of time and energy by using a template instead of starting on a blank canvas. As a digital product seller, templates of all different kinds can be sold.
Managing Template Links and Sales Platforms
Templates can be created and sold for social media posts, marketing materials, slide deck presentations, printable decor, invitations, and stationery — the list goes on. Canva is the number one tool that people love and go to when it comes to designing things that they need to be able to instantly print out.
Canva makes it really easy as a designer to create a template and then grab a unique template link to share with customers, so that each person that buys a template is not editing the original and not editing each other’s — they’ve all got their own automatic unique link that creates a unique copy for them.
Setting Up Your Online Shop
That unique copy is what they’re editing inside of their own Canva account after they purchase the template. This is not to be confused with becoming a Canva contributor — that is where you create templates that are going to be featured actually inside the Canva template library for people to use, which is a whole different thing.
This is about creating and selling your own templates in your own shop, whether that be on a platform like Etsy or with your own website hosted with a tool like Shopify. Regardless of where you set up shop, you can create these Canva templates inside of Canva totally for free, grab that template link, and deliver it to your buyer so that they can then use it.
Identifying Targeted Niches for Digital Printables
Focusing on Specific Customer Categories
The next digital product is a niche-specific printable. Printables of all different types can be sold, and people are more and more loving being able to just go online and purchase something they can instantly download and print out and use. The focus here is niche-specific — getting more targeted and focused on one specific niche or topic or ideal customer that you’re creating these printables for.
The approach is not to have a shop that just offers every type of printable under the sun but to be niche and topic specific. An example of this is teacher printables — everything in the shop is related to teachers and education and it’s targeted towards teachers as the ideal customer.
Conducting Market Research Using Sales Samurai
Utilizing Search Volume Data
There are several different types of printables even within that specific niche that could be created — printable posters that could go in classrooms, classroom decor, curriculum, or planner pages. Even though the focus is specific, there is still a wide variety of things that can be offered.
These types of niche-specific printable shops do really well on platforms like Etsy. It is recommended, no matter what digital product type you land on, to do a little bit of market research in the beginning to ensure that the idea you’re thinking of actually is a product that’s in demand. One of the best tools to do this with is Sales Samurai. When you sign up with Sales Samurai you get their whole web tool which has things like a keyword search function.
Analyzing Etsy Search Phrases and Monthly Volumes
There is an area where you can connect your shop to do an audit on your shop to see what could be improved, a listing creator where you can create your Etsy listings right from there, a competition tracker so you can follow what similar shops are doing, and a price calculator.
One of the most-used features of Sales Samurai is their Chrome extension. When the Chrome extension is installed, it can be used on Etsy — when something is typed into the Etsy search bar, Etsy will give suggestive phrases of things that people are searching for consistently and recently on the platform.
For this example, typing in “classroom” brings up things like classroom decor, classroom digital art, and classroom prints.
Refining Keyword Suggestions and Special Offers
With the Sales Samurai Chrome extension installed, there are little blue numbers that show up beside each one, which is showing the estimated monthly search volume for that phrase. This is the estimated amount of times each month that that specific phrase is searched for on the Etsy platform.
Analyzing Keyword Search Volume for Niche Opportunities
The term “classroom decor” is searched over 128,000 times per month — that tells us this has really high search volume and probably would be a good niche to look into. Clicking on “more” to the side opens the Sales Samurai keyword suggestions page, which gives a whole list of related keyword phrases to the one that was typed in. Clicking on search volume two times will order these suggested keyword phrases from most searched to least searched.
Accessing Trials and Discounts
The ones at the top are the very most searched phrases on Etsy, and the list can be browsed to get ideas for things that are highly searched and related to the topic.
For the “classroom decor” example, some highly searched phrases include ESL classroom decor, high school classroom decor, inclusive classroom decor, and US history classroom decor — the list goes on.
These can be marked as ones to possibly create products for. A free 3-day trial of Sales Samurai is available linked below, and inputting the code kate2 will get 20 percent off the monthly subscription beyond that.
Solving Problems Through Online Mini Courses
Solution Focused Learning for Quick Wins
Digital product type number three is an online mini course. The world of e-learning has only grown and grown in the past several years and become more in demand as people are loving being able to sign up for and take an online course to learn about something specific they’re interested in.
There are online courses out there about everything, and something as comprehensive as a full 10 or 20 hour long course can be created, or something like a mini course.
The mini course serves as a quick win for the ideal audience as it’s targeted and specific to just answering one question or solving one pain point that that person has.
Expert Requirements and Hosting Options
It doesn’t take up hours and hours and even weeks of time like sometimes these more comprehensive courses do. Students can usually get through a mini course in a matter of minutes or a few hours or even just a day and quickly get to the solution that they need.
Being a complete expert is not required to be able to offer a mini course like this. All that is really needed is to be about 10 percent ahead of the person that the course will be sold to. As long as a few things can be taught that that person doesn’t already know about the subject matter, that’s all that’s needed to be able to create and sell this type of digital product.
Attracting Ideal Customers
A mini course can get up and off the ground quicker, and a more appealing and competitive price point can be charged, which will get the ball rolling faster to make profits quickly. These types of courses don’t sell quite as well on platforms like Etsy, so they will need to be hosted on a website. There are a lot of different great course hosting websites out there like Teachable and Teachery.
Kajabi is a personal favorite, but there are options out there to find the one that’s the best fit. The best way to find ideal customers for courses is on social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook or even YouTube. A free 14-day trial of Kajabi is available linked below, and even in those 14 days a mini course can be built out to get things rolling to be able to offer it quickly.
Profiting from Stock Photography Bundles
Choosing Themes and Distribution Channels
Digital product type number four is a set of stock photos. For photographers or those with an interest or aptitude for photography, a set of stock photography can be sold for people like marketers and graphic designers to use. As long as graphic design is a thing, there will always be a need for these types of beautiful high-quality images.
There are a couple different routes to go with this — stock photo bundles can be sold on websites as a contributor, such as Shutterstock or Getty Images, on a marketplace platform like Etsy or Creative Market, or hosted completely on a personal website.
Creating Cohesive Visual Collections
A specific theme or topic should be chosen to create a bundle for. For example, for an interior bundle, photos of different interior rooms in a coastal or farmhouse style could be taken. All of the photos in the bundle should make sense together so someone looking for interior photos could purchase that bundle and feel confident that they would likely use most or all of them.
Food-related photos, photos with models, fashion or clothing-related photos, and mockup images are all options. There are lots of different ways to have fun with this, be creative, and make it profitable.
Using Design Tools to Create Profitable Ebooks
Developing Content and Finalizing PDF Files
Ebooks are one of the most tried and true digital product types there are, and they are still highly in demand. The process for creating and selling an ebook is to first determine what topic the ebook is going to be on, what to teach or go through, and what the content is going to be.
Once you have the content decided you can then bring that into a design tool like Canva, create it, design it, make it look exactly the way you want, input all of your text, and then download that as a final PDF file, which is what you’re going to sell.
Professional Design with Canva Pro
Canva is a favorite free design tool that is easy to use and you can do pretty much everything you need on the Canva free plan. They also have an upgraded Pro version that gives you access to more advanced features and photos and graphics and fonts.
A free 30-day trial of Canva Pro is available linked in the description box below. Once it’s all created, the PDF is downloaded and a listing is created on the chosen sales channel. Ebooks sell sometimes on platforms like Etsy, but a much better platform to sell a product like this on would be Amazon.
Designing and Selling Digital Wall Art Prints
Leveraging Creativity for Unique Home Decor
Digital wall art is one of the very favorite types of digital products to sell. More and more people are opting to purchase files that they can instantly download, print in whatever size they need, and then frame on their own or just put up on the wall, as opposed to actually going to a physical store and purchasing an actual physical art print.
When it comes to digital wall art, the sky really is the limit. Anything can be created in any style — it can be graphics only or could include text. This is one of the very favorite types of digital products because creativity can really run wild. Files can be created totally from scratch.
Managing Sizes and Aspect Ratios
When selling files for digital wall art, it is important to consider what sizes people might need and different aspect ratios, which could even be offered as a bundle together.
There is a whole digital product starter guide that has a complete table of all of the different digital wall art sizes and aspect ratios that are commonly offered — a totally free download linked below.
Packaging Graphic Design Assets for Creators
Selecting File Types and Finding Inspiration
Next up is graphic design assets — icons, illustrations, and graphic elements that content creators and graphic designers can use. These can come in a lot of different file types, but most commonly bundles or packs of these types of assets come as SVG files or PNG or even JPG. Sometimes bundles are offered with multiple different file types included.
A favorite way to get ideas for this type of product is to go on a website like Creative Market, search through their graphics section, see the different styles that they offer, the different types of graphics, and get some inspiration for things that could be created with a personal spin and twist that could be really helpful for someone using these types of assets to create their own designs. These types of graphic asset bundles can be sold on platforms like Etsy and Creative Market.
