This is a four part article on how to create passive income in the internet, if youhave not read the previous articles on how to create passive income online, you can read them with the links below.
Part 1: Earning Through Adsense
Part 1b: Earning Through Adsense
Part 2: Affiliate Marketing
How do you create passive income with digital products
Once again, our goal here is to create passive income and not a one time big time shot to glory or money. So we are looking for something that can give us income even if we do little or no work at all.
It is important to note that creating business or system that generates passive income does not happen overnight nor it comes automatically. If you have seen people that receives awesome amount of money with their online businesses, it is because they have work hard for it for a considerable amount of time perhaps few years before they received a decent income with their online businesses.
To build an online business that sells digital products is also the same as building traditional businesses that sells products or services, it needs time and consistency to build reputation before people will trust you as an authority for a certain niche and that is the hardest part to do.
Once your readers build trust with you and your works, the products you created will be embrace by your readers because they trust you and more than happy to purchase your products.
The reasons are obvious why savvy internet people are flocking into this type of internet business and for the benefit of people who wants to plunge in because they think that they have something valuable to offer for the internet users, here are some of obvious the benefits.
1. Transactions can be done without your presence or sales representative – The internet will do the most part, your part will be mostly creating products, advertising it and of course withdrawing your income.
2. Easy to create – This is particularly for people who preferred products to be in ebook format, all you need is an idea and a laptop or computer to create one.
3. Low cost – Unlike products sold in traditional or physical forms, digital products doesn’t need shipping cost, handling cost nor storing fees for your products. It is also relatively cheap to create it since all you need to have is the computer that you are holding right now and few specialized software if you decide to create digital software.
4. Easy to distribute – It would only take you seconds each time a customer decided to purchase your product since all transaction are being done through the internet from payment process to delivering of the product.
The list is long for digital products that are being sold online but there are digital forms that made big hits online because of the electronic platforms that are popularly used by people like the famous tablets that can store various digital file formats such as ebooks and audiobooks. Here are some popular digital formats that are being sold online that you too can create.
1. Ebooks – The most popular type of format for authors since this is the easiest and cheapest to produce, all you need to have is an idea, a word processing software such as microsoft word and time to research on the topic you want to write.
2. Audio and video – This type of product range from music, tutorials, audiobooks, inspirational audios and anything possible that can be recorded digitally. A one good example of this is the website of my online classmate Pepin Ordona’s website Indie Music Philippines, the site sells songs of Filipino independent music artist. Although he did not created the songs himself, he made deal to sell their products online, a brilliant way to earn online!
3. Photography – Sell your beautiful photos online by submitting it to online stock photography sites such as Istockphoto, Shutterpoint and Fotolia or create your own website for selling photos.
4. Create Software Products – If you are a savvy computer programmer, you have the chance to make a dent in this industry, you wont need any big software companies to publish your product, you just have to market it online.
5. Games and Applications – Although this is quite similar with creating software, this is much different in terms of your target customers. If you have already heard of Apple Itunes and you have the skill to develop games and applications for Apple lovers, dig in!, or else you will miss the gold rush of these present times.
If you are like me who is not an expert with programming but knows how to write and use a computer, the best way to go is to write your ideas in PDF or ebook format. Just type your ideas in a word processor software and convert it to PDF file and presto! you have your ebook already.
As for other products, you need a special tools or software such adobe audition or Garage Band to record a good audio as well as special equipment such as microphone for better result.
For videos, you may use paid or free software to record it. Please take note that you may have to purchase these products and shell out some money if you don’t have similar existing software and equipment. If you have a better solution for recording audios without spending, it would be much better.
Photos is much easier to produce especially if you are a professional photographer. Some knowledge of editing software such as Adobe Photoshop would be helpful or other similar photo editing software.
Creating software, games and application needs skills for programming, if you have the skill and knowledge you can do it and sell it online otherwise you have to get other people to do it for you for a certain fee. I honestly have not tried this part yet because I don’t have the skill, but in the future, it should be easy to outsource this especially if you have a very good idea of what type of software that would help a lot of people.
You need to sign up with few services online to make this happen. You need a paypal account to process credit card payments and put paypal buttons on your site where you are selling your products.
Autoresponder is also a must with online business since this will automate your sales pitch and follow up emails for your client. Don’t fall for costly autoresponders if you can get it for free with a good service too, just like listwire which offers free service for this tool. You will still use paypal for this by including your paypal link to your emails
Now if you have some dollars to spare, you can use a professional service such as the 1Shopping cart to process all the payments as well as storing of your digital products for download.
In conclusion, selling digital products online is fairly easy if you are willing to debut your time to creating one. The cost is minimal or none at all but the returns are awesome if you will just do it right.
