5 Steps To Making Passive Income With Digital Products
You wake up to notifications and sleep while they keep rolling in.
I don’t know about you, but I love every bit of that experience.
In 5 steps, I’ll show you how to go from having no idea about digital products to making passive income with them.
Starting with…
Step 1: Pick a Marketing Strategy
Usually, what everyone else tells you to do first is “pick a niche,”
but I’m saying this instead: “pick a marketing strategy first.”
The bottom line is this: it’s less about having the best product in your perfect niche per se, and more about having the best marketing strategy for you.
Marketing is what brings buyers.
So, at the very least, decide what your strategy will be from the start.
In my opinion, there are three ways to drive buyers to your digital products:
- Sell on marketplaces where they’re already buying (It could be marketplaces like Amazon KDP, Udemy, or Skillshare, depending on what you sell.)
- Build an audience and sell to them (it could be on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and others.)
- Sell to other people’s audiences (It could also be Facebook groups and subreddits run by other marketers.)
I’ve tried all three methods, and they work.
So pick just one and stick with it for a while.
Step 2: Learn everything about your marketing strategy
For marketplaces, you’ll need to learn about,
- Keyword research to pick the perfect keyword
- SEO to optimize your listing to rank
- and product listing optimization to outshine your competition
To build an audience to sell your digital products, you’ll need to learn
- how algorithms on different platforms work,
- how to build a profitable brand,
- and how to build trust and convert your followers into customers.
Finally, when marketing to other people’s audiences, you’ll need to learn
- the rules of that community,
- how to build authority and trust within the community,
- and how to sell without directly selling.
Learning the right things will keep you from wasting precious time.
Step 3: Pick a Product to sell
While it sounds easy on paper, choosing a product to sell is one of the most critical steps in the entire process.
Based on real-time experience, I’ve come to understand that people buy only what they know they need.
The emphasis here is on “know.”
Buyers need to be aware of their problem and care enough about it to want to solve it before you can sell them your solution.
So, whatever product you sell, ask this simple question:
- Is it a hobby product (where buyers can buy at leisure),
- or is it a problem-solving product (where buyers feel they must buy as soon as possible)?
Don’t get me wrong — hobby products sell too.
But if you’re aiming to make thousands of dollars selling your digital product, you’ll need to focus on problem-solving products.
What if you don’t know what problem you solve or what products you can create around it?
That’s where niche research comes in.
Ask yourself:
- What skills do you already have?
- What knowledge have you built over time?
- What experience have you gathered?
- What comes naturally to you?
Answer these questions to find a niche that suits your unique personality.
Then, explore that niche to see which problem-solving digital products already exist.
Study the top-performing ones, and voila — you have a winner.
4. Create Your MVP
MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product, and it’s essentially the simplest version of your product that provides the best value to buyers.
In simple terms, this means that instead of a 41-page ebook for $19.99, you could create a 7-page ebook for $4.99.
Your MVP is the basic version of your digital product, packed with value in the shortest form possible.
There are two reasons for this:
- You want to be able to launch as quickly as possible to test the market and improve afterward.
- You want to get real-time feedback to shape your product based on buyer needs (so you’re building for buyers, not just for yourself).
So, take a weekend or two to focus solely on creating your MVP. Then, launch it!
5. Market, Market, Market
Depending on the marketing strategy you choose, this might look a bit different.
When I sold on marketplaces, it involved upfront keyword research, listing, and SEO optimization.
I did the work upfront and focused on creating even more products.
Then the sales came on their own as my products started to rank on the search engine.
Conclusion
So you see, when it comes to selling digital products, there’s really no one-size-fits-all strategy.
Thankfully, these 5 steps encompass all three marketing strategies, so pick what feels best for you and go with it.
That said, if you love the idea of selling digital products and making passive income from them,
I have a guide that goes in-depth into important details I couldn’t cover here, such as:
- picking a profitable niche (very important)
- building your brand voice, theme, and style
- planning your digital product from start to finish
- creating high-quality digital products that sell
- identifying your target audience
- and much more
It’s the ultimate all-in-one guide for a beginner looking to sell digital products.