And, I’m not talking about a passive income which is just a little more money in your pocket every month. I am talking about life-altering income. Digital downloads are almost as passive as it gets on the internet. You put them up on a sales platform, and they handle the rest. They send you a commission check at the end of the month.
I was combing through Pinterest the other day and ran across a story of someone selling printable digital designs online. And, making a living doing it. I know this could always be a side hustle, but what caught my eye with her is that it was passive and she made full-time money doing it. To be very honest, small side hustles don’t thrill me anymore. I’ve made small amounts of side hustle money for years. Now, I’m looking for something more. I want to make a full-time income online.
For years, I wandered through the online thing, skipping around, and never really thought anyone could earn big money unless you were Amazon or you sold internet marketing courses to people like me who wanted to be internet marketers. I got discouraged and got stuck in my mind to settle for small side money every month. Now, I found three excellent examples of things people can sell online and earn big money doing it.
Side Hustle Idea #1; Start an Etsy store to sell scrapbooking stickers and prints
This story is the one that got me researching this article. I ran across an article about a woman who quit her excellent design job to travel and sell downloadable designs on her Etsy store. Etsy is usually known as an arts and crafts online marketplace. However, they have since expanded to selling downloadable products like clip art, font collections, scrapbook products, and planner pages. She had been a designer for a company doing the same thing she was doing now for herself. The hardest part of designing on your own is finding customers and having a platform to sell them.
The platform is the beautiful thing that Etsy supplies to designers. They give them the platform and the sales funnel. At the end of the month, the designer just gets a check for the royalties on their sales. Etsy is as passive as it gets. Design it once, and it keeps on earning for her over an extended period. Her process was to build up a bunch of designs on Etsy before quitting her job and hitting the road to travel the world.
Now, she makes a sizeable passive income and lives the life of her dreams. That’s what I mean by life-altering money.
Side Hustle Idea #2; Design doll clothes patterns and sell them through your store
I ran across this story as I was researching this article. She was a mom of two daughters who were really into dolls. Being a skilled seamstress, she began making doll clothes for her daughters. She started just making the clothes. When several friends saw the clothes, they asked if she could make them some. She was up and running with a side business. The problem was, her income was capped by how much she could sew in a day. She found her max to be around $1,000. So, she decided only to sell the patterns instead.
After struggling through several different phases of her business, she opened up a Shopify store to sell downloadable doll clothes patterns. Her story gets a little different here than the other two. A Shopify store is similar to having your website instead of selling on someone else’s platform like the Etsy store. The profit can be higher because they don’t take a percentage of each sale. The Shopify store did solve a bunch of platform problems they were having.
Speaking of money, she claims to have made somewhere to the tune of $600,000 per year. That is a pretty good business for just downloadable doll clothes patterns. And, she’s doing it by not selling marketing products to people who want to be marketers.
Side Hustle Idea #3; Selling ebooks as an Amazon fiction author
Now I’m going to tell you Wayne Stinnett’s story. He was an over-the-road truck driver until he found his calling as a fiction writer and started self-publishing books on Amazon Kindle. He wrote a series of short stories many years before but never did anything with them. He had always dreamed of making a living as an author, but still had his eye on the traditional publishing route and getting on bookstore shelves.
After his son-in-law showed him how to self-publish books on Amazon’s Kindle program, it was off to the races. He took out those old stories and began reorganizing them into his first novel which he completed in three months and put it up for sale in the Amazon Kindle Store. He cranked out another novel in 2 ½ months and put that one up on the Kindle platform as well.
A month after he published the second book he made $2,500. After learning more about the publishing business and self-publishing more books, he was making more publishing books than driving a truck, so he quit to be a full-time author. In an article I read, his truck driving job paid around $45,000 per year, and his book sales put him at four times his old truck driving job. That puts him well into the six-figure-per-year selling downloadable electronic books on the Kindle platform.
From these stories alone, you can see the potential upside to selling digital download products. As the digital marketplace opens up further, there will be more opportunities for different types of professions to get into the passive income game. The design options don’t just stop at the ones listed above. You can design just about anything and find a producer for it. Let your imagination go.
If you were a designer years ago, one of your only options was to freelance design work for clients. Now, designers can create their own products and become retailers. And, it can be almost all passive income.
Be safe,
Kevin