If you’re creating a digital product that falls in the category of a template or a file or a printable that someone can download. These are super easy to sell and there are so many ways you can do it. If you are running a site, you can easily create a PayPal button for that product and a page that it redirects to when someone buys that has a download link for the product. To create easy downloads for people I use Dropbox and it’s the best solution in my opinion, but you can use any other provider. So, if you’re using WordPress you can easily do this with woocommerce, which is my personal favorite. It is very robust or not, depending on how you want to use it, but one way or another, it is certainly best for aliexpress best sellers. But you can easily use it with digital products. And what happens is someone goes into your store and they find the pretty thing that they want to buy, they buy it, they add it to their cart; and then as soon as the payment goes through, your system sends them an automatic download whether it’s via email or they get a page on check out. Either way, they can go in and click download now and you didn’t have to do anything. You can also use a plug-in called Easy Digital downloads, which makes it really easy and then if all of these seem out of your realm, there are third-party apps and sites that will let you do this. Send owl is a really good example.
So a couple of things to consider when you’re delivering content to people this excludes courses, this is all about the other templates and printables and things like that that you’re going to want to deliver. Now, you’re going to want to make sure that your file is zipped up if you’re uploading to a system like woocommerce or Easy Digital downloads, so that when someone clicks the link the download starts automatically. If you’re creating a template or something that has multiple versions of the same design for different programs. So back to my keynote example, if I wanted to create a PowerPoint presentation that was readable and PowerPoint and keynote and Google Slides, then I would probably want to put them all in a folder, so someone could choose which one they want to use and zip that bad boy up and that’s what I upload to my system. Now, the point of digital products are that you make it easy on yourself and your customer. So make it easy on you, make sure that they get the download automatically that you don’t have to do any work together.
You do not want to have to be emailing every single person who wants a digital product from you, it then becomes a not so passive form of income. So make it easy, find the way that fits you best and market the snot out of it.
The possibilities with selling digital products are truly endless. People are always trying to learn new skills, what this means is that most people, if they’re looking to learn about marketing or about a particular subject they need to learn it from somewhere. What a lot of people would do in this scenario is to go to college. The big problem with that is it’s going to cost you thousands of dollars if not tens of thousands. And also, by the time things are written in a textbook and published, they are often outdated. On the other hand, online courses are a way for people to learn different skills without spending tens of thousands of dollars. And these courses are also much more current and up-to-date, because it’s not like these things are being written into a college textbook. There is no doubt that the people who are making a lot of money with online courses are the people that are actually selling them. It’s kind of like the old analogy of the gold rush. It wasn’t the guys that were digging for gold that were actually making the most money, it was the guys that were selling the pickaxes and shovels to actually dig for gold.
So if you are somebody who is maybe more extroverted or you like the idea of teaching, this can be one of the best methods for earning passive income by taking something that you’re already knowledgeable about, packaging it up into an online course and then selling it to people online. And not only are you making a really good passive income source for yourself, you’re also helping people in a certain area of their life where they’re definitely struggling with, so it’s a win-win situation and you might be saying to yourself: “who in the world is going to buy an online course?”, but you would honestly be surprised. As of 2019, the average cost of a four-year private college education is now 32000$ and you have thousands, tens of thousands of people, even hundreds of thousands of people signing up to go $30,000 into debt every single year as they enrol in private colleges. So as more people shift to learning online, we’re just going to begin to see more and more demand for online courses.
If people are going to waste 30 grand for a college education, it’s not uncommon for somebody to spend $1000 to $2500 on an online course that’s going to be far more current and applicable. The best thing about having an online course is that you build it once and then once it’s actually up and running you can generate sales for yourself and it’s going to be completely passive running without your active involvement.
If you have knowledge in your brain, if you have a certain skill set that you think people would be willing to pay for in terms of the information then why not share this with them. There’s usually some upfront money that you’re going to have to put out and you have to put out some upfront time, but the return on courses can be huge. I have a handful of friends that make a ton of money off of courses. So if you have information like that in your brain that you think other people would pay for, then definitely courses are a fantastic way for you to make money and you can do it off a YouTube channel that doesn’t have to be monetized, we will touch more on than later in the book.
