How To Create And Sell Digital Products? This Is How I Make Money While I Sleep!
In this blog post, I will touch upon a very painful problem every creative freelancer worldwide, myself included, was confronted with when the coronavirus took over the world—the problem of selling a time-based service.
I will tell you the downside of selling a time-based service, and I will talk about my experiences with solving the problem of being solely dependent on selling your time by creating & selling digital products online.
I will tell you what digital products are and how you can use them to create a passive income stream. This will allow you to diversify your income and make money while you sleep!
Table of contents:
Why I started creating digital products?
When the corona lockdowns took place, film productions were shut down, and marketing budgets were put on hold.
Not being able to get my hands on new projects made me realize that, as a filmmaker, you’re working in a time-selling factory.
Now that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but your factory is simply out of business when you can’t sell your time, or someone doesn’t want to buy your time.
The pandemic forced me to look at different ways to earn an income. It made me realize that I no longer wanted to depend solely on trading my time for money.
After extended research, I discovered the benefits of the online world and the endless possibilities of creating and selling digital products online and building an online business.
I embarked on a new adventure to create a new revenue stream by selling digital products on my website and eventually started making money while sleeping. The only thing I now need is a laptop and an internet connection to run my online business anywhere on the planet.
What are digital products?
First things first, let’s define what a digital product actually is before we hit the ground running.
In the world of e-commerce (selling stuff online), there is one holy grail regarding sales—digital products. In essence, a digital product is something without a physical substance. It’s a digital file or digital good you can’t physically touch, taste or smell.
It’s a digital asset, often created for educational or entertainment purposes that you can easily access via a digital download after you buy it online. Examples of digital products are e-books, online courses, songs, applications, or software packages.
Why make and sell a digital product?
As I mentioned, freelancing (or even working for an employer) is about trading your time for money. It's essentially selling your experience and expertise, the stuff between your ears, that can earn you money.
Now, if you've always dreamed about doing your work and making money while doing it, I can assure you that this can be a fantastic way to earn a living!
The only problem is that you're making zero money when you don't have the opportunity to sell your time (because of a pandemic, for example).
Trading time for money isn’t scalable
Besides that, time isn't scalable. It's not like you once invested your time designing or inventing a product that you can sell infinitely. The business model of selling a time-based service is not scalable.
You can only make money during your working hours by selling a time-based service. You can work harder and acquire more work, but you can't clone yourself to work on more productions simultaneously.
You are an hour-selling factory that can only sell one second at a time.
If you keep selling your time as a freelancer, you'll have to keep doing that until you die or until you have made enough money to live a financially independent life.
Unfortunately, that's not something that happens overnight and can take many years to achieve.
Selling digital products results in Passive income
This is why I believe an additional, passive income stream for everyone who’s trading their time for money is vital, and creating a digital product can help you achieve that!
Creating digital products requires a single investment in time (or money) and then takes little to no time to maintain while generating income.
You can make it as big as you want and invest as much in it as you like. There are no rules. There are no requirements. To make it even better, the sky is the limit regarding the amount of money you can make with digital products!
making money online via digital products is not a ‘get-rich-quick’ scam
Sounds almost too good to be true, right? When I discovered you could make money online selling digital products, I thought it was one of those lousy get-rich-quick internet scams. One of those "once-in-a-lifetime opportunities" you have to onboard today.
You only need to purchase this magic product, make a single investment, and then the money keeps sliding into your bank account. As you can imagine, free money doesn't exist in this world.
But the more research I did, the more I realized that it is possible to make money while you sleep using the internet!
What are the advantages of selling digital products?
The most significant advantage of creating and selling digital products I discovered is that you can make them anywhere you want!
That includes during lunch break, on your couch at home, in bed, or even during a session on the toilet. Besides the creation aspect, I can administer and run my online shop anywhere on the planet from my phone!
Below I’ve summed up five advantages of selling digital products:
Digital products scale easily.
Contrary to selling my time to one person or company at a time, I can now simultaneously sell a digital product online to an unlimited number of people.
This means that I don’t have to work harder to generate more income and my earnings are no longer solely dependent on people paying me for my time as a filmmaker.
Digital products have no inventory problems.
When the ship Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal, the logistics of the entire planet got on hold. That won’t happen with selling digital products online.
A digital product will never run out of stock. People can place an order at any hour of the day, and I’ll never have to re-stock!
Digital products have no warehouse fees.
Because it’s a digital product stored on my website server, I won’t have to pay for a physical location like a warehouse or a storage unit to store my products.
The only costs I have are a website and an online store membership which is a few hundred dollars per year.
Digital products have no shipping costs.
Once a visitor completes the payment, they will receive an instant download link to their purchase. That means I have zero shipping costs!
I won’t have to deal with product packaging, delivery services, delays (like a Suez Canal or pandemic scenario), and other shipping logistics.
Everything is automated—instant payment results in an instant download. I can sell a product online 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Yep, that means even while I’m sleeping!
Digital products have no material costs.
Because it’s a digital product, I didn’t have to invest in physical materials to construct my products.
This means that everyone of every age can create a digital product! You only need a laptop and an internet connection to do the work and sell your products online!
How to create digital products?
Creating a digital product that sells is about an exchange of value. People won't spend their hard-earned cash on it if it doesn't contain value for them.
So, if you want to create something of great value, the best way to approach creating your own digital products is by looking at what problems you can help solve for others.
I believe it is essential to approach it like that because when people experience problems, they are willing to pay money to help them solve them. In the end, if you have a problem money can solve, you don't have a problem at all!
Creating A digital product you wish existed when you were younger
The best way to define your digital product is to look at your own career or expertise. Is there something that you wish had existed when you started?
A question you couldn't find the answers to? This can be anything like knowledge, experience, or tools that would've helped you create the projects you've worked on in the past.
Were you looking for a guide for something particular? A step-by-step breakdown of how to price your fee? A tutorial for working with a specific tool? An After Effects template to create a specific effect? A collection of LUTS to shape a particular look? Or a unique library of sounds of an unusual animal?
With this approach in mind, I wrote my first e-book. A step-by-step guide to writing and designing documents that help sell your filmmaker's vision to potential clients. Something I wish existed when I started creating these pitch documents!
If you want to create a digital product, I advise you to find something you wish existed when you were younger and create that with the knowledge and skills you have today.
Think about what you're already good at, which sets you apart from others. Once you've found that, find a way to turn that knowledge or skill into a service or product.
If you were looking for something in particular during your career journey, another person from the world's 7 billion population might be looking for the same thing. If you can provide that valuable thing for them to help someone solve a problem, I assure you they will be prepared to pay for it.
Other ways to find your digital product
If you don't know what that might be or want to create something else, you can discover what other people are searching for using Google's Autocomplete function or Google Trends.
These tools help show you what other people search for and their search volumes (how often something is searched each week/month/year).
If you can provide a valuable solution related to what people are searching for online, you can turn that into a digital product and create a passive income stream!
9 Digital product ideas
To help you on your way, I will outline nine potential digital product ideas below.
Online course
For this example, I use studying at school, which isn’t for everybody. It’s time-consuming, expensive, and doesn’t always provide the desired outcome you’re looking for.
Luckily, in the online world, you can help those who don’t want, can’t, or prefer not to go to film school by providing them with an online filmmaking course.
This is an on-demand classroom experience where you teach your audience specific knowledge using text, audio, and video.
There are already many online courses out there, so try to find a particular niche market in which you can provide value. Something you have extensive working experience with is the best place to start.
E-Books
Everybody, you included, has specific knowledge and experience with particular subjects.
This knowledge is just sitting in your brain, like a resident occupying an apartment without paying rent. You can put that valuable knowledge to work for you by sharing it.
If you have specific knowledge regarding a subject, you can create an e-book about it. This is a digital version of a hardcopy book, but you don’t need a publisher to release and sell it!
Sound Effect Libraries
If you have a smartphone with an audio recorder function, you can create a sound effect library.
Like online courses, there are already many different audio file libraries for sale online. Hence, you need to find a niche market where you can become the best or provide something that isn’t already out there.
For example, if your parents have an exclusive old-timer collection of sports cars, you can record the sound of each car’s element separately and sell the audio files!
Think of sounds like opening the door handle, the engine sound, turning the ignition key, switching gears, etc.
Transition Packages
Custom build transitions can help filmmakers achieve a specific effect and give the project an identity of its own when it comes to creating super smooth and unique transitions between different shots.
Think of light leaks, film projector material, glitches, 3D transitions, and many more. All different tools can help elevate a project!
After Effects Templates
Many filmmakers and video artists love taking their projects to the next level. One way to do that is by adding cool (graphic) effects.
Not everybody is as skilled as a Visual Effects Artist, so if you have some proper skills with Adobe After Effects, you can create your own After Effects Templates for openers, logo strings, video displays, product promos, infographics, titles, etc.
Lots of examples can be found on Videohive. You can sell these templates on your own platform or become a contributor on Videohive.
LUTs and presets
After filming and editing, every filmmaker loves to add a cinematic touch to their images. This can be done via color grading.
The downside of color grading is that it can be very time consuming and requires specific technical knowledge to achieve the desired look. This is where LUTs can help!
Luts are predetermined color settings that you can drag and drop on your video files within the editing software, making color grading much easier and faster!
Many filmmakers and photographers sell LUTs as digital products in their stores to recreate their specific looks. If you want to know how to create your LUT, check out this tutorial for how to do it in Adobe Premiere and this tutorial for how to do it in Photoshop.
Stock Music
For years, high-quality royalty-free music has been one of the hardest things to find.
Licenses had to be bought depending on many different parameters, which ultimately became very expensive. This is precisely where a platform called Artlist stepped in and filled that gap.
If you like creating music as digital products, you can become a contributor and make money! Other than Artlist, there are many more online platforms where you can become a contributor and sell your music.
Stock Footage
If you’re already filming something, why not sell those shots after you’ve released the project? Depending on your projects, you can negotiate with your client to sell outtakes or the RAW footage on stock websites like FilmSupply, Artgrid, Pond5, etc.
Because these stock footage websites already contain thousands of shots, you must research before submitting your footage to ensure you sell something unique.
Stock Photos
If you work as a visual creator, you probably like to take a photo camera with you wherever you go.
Instead of just having these photos on a hard drive somewhere at home, why not sell them online? You can sell them via stock photo websites like iStockphoto.
But if you don’t want to share the profits, you can also sell stock photos on your own website. You can even sell them offline as a printed canvas!
Where to sell digital products?
After you’ve created your digital product, you need a place to sell it. There are many different options, depending on the kind of product you’ve made.
I advise selling your digital products via your own website instead of choosing a digital marketplace like Amazon, Videohive, or iStockphoto.
This is because it will allow you to build a much stronger relationship with your clients, and you won’t have to pay the sometimes hefty overhead fees that these platforms will charge you.
I currently use Squarespace for my online store. They offer many different memberships, depending on the size of your business, and I love working with this platform as it has all the tools under one roof. From domain, hosting, design, email marketing, SEO tools, analytics, invoicing… You name it!
Besides Squarespace, there are many other different options to choose from. I have no experience with them, so I can’t provide an honest opinion about them:
How to sell digital products?
I’ve learned that selling a digital product is more complicated than creating one. Creating a digital product and setting up an online store are the first easy steps.
To eventually make money while you sleep, you need customers in your shop to actually buy the digital products you’ve created.
And that all comes down to marketing, about targeting your audience with the right messages to lure them into your webshop and convince them to purchase.
Selling digital products is all about marketing
With billions of websites and millions of new ones added each year, it’s not apparent that people will instantly visit your webshop and start buying your digital products.
Depending on the kind of digital product you’ve created and the platform you use, you need to invest some serious efforts in marketing to make sure people can find you online.
Many entrepreneurs say you need to invest more time (60%) in marketing than in making the actual product (40%).
Marketing is important because people have a lot of skepticism when encountering your digital product. The harsh reality is that people only care about what’s in it for them.
People want to know the value they will get, the amount of money they can make, or how much more extraordinary their project will look by implementing that simple plugin or lower-third you’ve created.
But most importantly, they want to know, can I trust this person and digital product? Do they deliver what they promise to deliver?
Good marketing can help you with that, and below, I’ve set out a few ways to help you do that:
Third-party marketing
If you sell stock material as a contributor on an external online marketplace like Artgrid, Artist, iStockphoto, Pond5, Videohive, etc., they are doing the marketing for you. These massive world-renowned platforms won’t have to prove their legitimacy anymore.
The downside of selling on an external medium is that you’ll have to pay a commission for each sale. If you want to maximize your profits and use your own online platform to sell your digital products, you need to put some extra effort into it.
Social media marketing
The most apparent method to market your digital products is to promote them via social media outlets.
Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Vimeo, and LinkedIn are ways to let your audience know that you’ve created something that can help them in the filmmaking process.
You can make all sorts of digital content in which you talk about the value you can provide for your audience.
The downside of promoting via social media is that you’ll need a dedicated audience, which isn’t necessarily found from one today to another. Still, it can be lost overnight if you don’t follow the guidelines of the platform you are using.
If you want to build an audience fast, there are a few simple ways to do that: using freebies, giveaways, and special discounts. This will give a fast result in driving traffic to your webshop.
selling digital products through Email marketing
Another way to reach an audience is by using email marketing. According to some, this is the best way to create a strong relationship with your audience. But be careful when using email marketing.
Because of spam prevention, you need to consider all sorts of regulations and laws before you start adding everybody to your email list and spamming them with the digital products you’ve created.
Selling digital products through Content marketing
Another option is to use something called content marketing. This all has to do with SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization. When you search for something online, a search engine like Google or Yahoo will provide you with the best answers.
If you want your digital products to be discovered by search engines, you need to create valuable answers for what people are searching for so that the search engines will rank your website higher in their search results.
The main reason for using content marketing on your website is that it will allow free access to an audience you otherwise would not have reached. You educate your audience via YouTube tutorials, blog posts, webinars, and other marketing tools.
Like this particular blog article you are reading right now, sharing free knowledge and providing tips and tricks will eventually lead to search engines driving free organic traffic to your website (Check this video to see how you can do that).
The downside of working with the SEO and content marketing option is that you must have a lot of patience. It can take 3-10 months for a search engine to index your website in the higher ranks of their search results.
Your frenemies (filmmaker competitors) might also write blog posts to optimize their SEO ranking by choosing the same subjects and search keywords you want to use, so you need to find a way to outrank them.
Best way to do that? Create better and more engaging content. Provide your audience with better information, more personal anecdotes, more stories, better designs, better images, more videos, and better layouts.
The more that you’ll give, the more that you’ll get. It will be a long road, but once you’re there, you’ll receive tons of free traffic through search engines every day on a steady basis, and you won’t be dependent on weekly giveaways or social media campaigns.
I believe it’s all about finding the right balance between quick and long-term results.
Become a digital product supplier!
I know firsthand that it can be scary as hell to create your own digital product and sell it to the online world.
But you know what, you’ll never know the true value of a digital product unless you try to create and sell one yourself. So just do it!
Scale your business the right way
Start diversifying your income stream as a filmmaker, and I’ll assure you that it will give you more inner peace and headspace.
It will allow you to cherry-pick the projects you like to work on instead of working for clients every day and doing what everybody else is doing in the film industry, starting their own film production company to acquire more and bigger jobs.
In most cases, this eventually results in trying to get your hands on as many projects as possible to pay salaries, office rent, insurance, and keep the company alive.
Unless you want to go there by appealing to a specific nice market, my advice is not to go down that path. I’ve been there, became a filmmaking factory, and wasn’t enjoying the journey anymore. You’ll eventually reach a point where you feel creatively drained and unfulfilled.
Like me, at that stage of my career, many creative businesses focused on staying alive and floating instead of expanding their business in areas they might not have thought about.
Expand into new grounds
Instead of expanding the number of jobs, try to expand your existing projects into new grounds. If you have wisdom or skills regarding a specific subject or creating a particular type of content, share it by creating a digital product about it!
If you’ve shot a beautiful project, sell the raw material on a stock platform, sell the digital storyboards, sell the screenplay, sell project-related merchandise, or write a book about the learning curve of that specific project combined with some beautiful making-of photographs. You need to become a Filmtrepreneur!
It isn’t strange that big Hollywood studios like Disney make more money with their merchandise and theme parks than the actual movies. Those things are easily scalable.
The studios don’t rely solely on people paying money to watch their films. In a world where everything is free and on demand, such a business model isn’t scalable.
Always provide value
Yes, this will take some serious time and effort, so you have to give up the short-term gratification of making instant money by selling your time to reach the long-term goal of building a steady passive income stream.
And yes, compared to selling a physical product, it might be harder to sell something that somebody can’t get their hands on. Therefore the golden rule for creating a digital product is to provide something of great value.
In the online world, value is king. Not content is king. If you can give your audience a tool, knowledge, or something entertaining that holds great value or helps them save time, money, and energy, they will be prepared to pay for it.
Approach it as creating a solution for something you wish existed when you started your career. Once you’ve found that, it’ll be easy to make whatever that is.
Good luck!
