Digital Downloads (Printables, Templates, Etc.) Seller

Digital downloads are files that consumers can purchase and download onto their computers or phones.

There are many types of digital downloads, and they come in various formats. They include:

• Images (which come in formats that include .jpg, .png, etc.)
• Audio and video files (.wav, .mp4, etc.)
• Movies (.mov, .mp4 again, etc.)
• Documents (.doc, .pdf, etc.)

Put another way: A digital download is any product that you can produce and sell online, without worrying about manufacturing, maintaining an inventory, or shipping.

Most online merchants who sell digital downloads do so via an e-commerce website or an established online marketplace, such as Etsy or Amazon.

Pros and cons of selling digital downloads

To give you an idea of whether you want to learn more about this side hustle, here’s a quick look at its pros and cons:

In more detail: benefits of selling digital downloads as a side hustle

Digital downloads are easy to distribute and have low production costs, which makes them attractive to both buyers and sellers.

For instance, e-books are cheaper to produce than physical books, which means sellers can pocket correspondingly higher profits. They also have a sizable audience of customers who like to read but prefer the convenience of doing so on their phones or tablets.

In addition to their minimal overhead, digital downloads also come with the following advantages:

• Automation: Because you don’t have to worry about printing or shipping digital downloads, selling them is a low-maintenance operation. Once you set up your online shop and payment processor, your consumers can make and collect their purchases without your help.
• Wide reach: Digital sales aren’t limited by geography. Consumers can download products from any part of the world, as long as it has internet access.
• Scalability: You can sell a single digital product an infinite number of times. The only cap on the size of your business is determined by your marketing strategy.

These perks make selling digital products a popular side hustle for people who are looking for a source of passive income.

Problems with selling digital products as a side hustle

No side gig is perfect, of course. Selling digital products also comes with several risks and disadvantages, including:

• Stiff competition: Because this is such an accessible hustle, there are a lot of people involved in it already, and many niches are saturated with sellers. It can be tough to establish yourself when you’re a newcomer to the market.
• Piracy: Digital products can be copied and illegally shared. Piracy is a constant threat as a digital download seller, and you’ll have to take active measures to thwart it if you don’t want it to eat into your earnings.

It’s certainly possible to make money as a purveyor of digital downloads, but you’ll need to study the market and work very hard if you want your operation to be one of the ones that takes off instead of the many that eventually fold.

To help you get started, we’ll introduce some of the most popular digital products below. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it will give you a good sense of what people are talking about when they refer to digital downloads. Hopefully, it will also give you an idea of what you’d like to sell.

E-books

As you probably already know, an e-book is an electronic book that you can read on an e-reader (e.g., a Kindle), smartphone, tablet, computer, or another digital device.

If you’re a talented writer and have something to say, self-publishing e-books is one of the more obvious ways of making money by selling digital downloads.

How to get started

The first step is to actually write a book. You can write anything you want, although in the non-fiction market, self-help e-books are particularly popular, and when it comes to fiction, romance is by far the biggest genre.

Upon finishing your book, consider hiring an editor or proofreader to review it. Getting a second pair of eyes on your work is always a good idea—they can give you a fresh perspective on your writing and catch embarrassing mistakes.

Depending on your budget, you can hire a graphic designer to design your book or do it yourself with beginner-friendly tools like Canva and Designrr (both of which provide free templates that you can use even if you have no design experience). Pay attention to details like the size and font of the e-book’s text and the placement of any images you include.

When you’re done, export your e-book and self-publish it via a platform like Kindle Direct Publishing.

Online courses

Online courses usually consist of pre-recorded videos with supplemental educational materials, such as worksheets. Creating and selling courses is a popular side hustle for teachers, as well as anyone that’s highly knowledgeable in an in-demand field.

There are a lot of online courses out there already—this is a good example of a digital product with a saturated market—so if you want to succeed, you need to know how to create a sensible curriculum, present material in a clear and engaging way, and market your product effectively.

How to get started

First off, pick a topic that aligns with your skills, knowledge, experience, and interests. Next, do a little market research to determine whether your idea has enough potential to justify the effort of creating a course.

Search for your topic on Reddit, Quora, and Facebook to see how many people are discussing it and what questions they’re asking. You can also identify a few target keywords (e.g., “electrical engineering” or “antique furniture restoration”) and toss them into Google Trends to check their search volume.

To produce high-quality videos, record your lessons in a soundproof room. If editing video isn’t your strong suit, it may be worth it to hire a freelancer on Upwork or Fiverr to help you polish your work.

Stock photos

Stock photos are licensed images that you can distribute for commercial use—for a small fee.

Selling stock photos generally isn’t a very lucrative business (in most cases, you’ll earn under $1 per sale), but it’s still one of the most common photography side hustles. That’s because it’s a good way to generate passive income without much effort. When you upload an image to a stock photo site, you never have to touch it again; you can sit back and let the (admittedly modest) money roll in.

How to get started

There isn’t much mystery about how to sell stock photos. Just get yourself a camera, identify a subject, snap a few pictures, and upload them to one of these websites:

• Pexels
• Shutterstock
• iStock
• Adobe Stock
• Wirestock

Since stock photos are mostly meant for commercial purposes, you need to think like an advertiser and consider the type of pictures that people want to use. Shutterstock, a very popular image site, has an article on the 15 most popular types of stock photos. (Staged office photos are particularly big, since many blogs use them for illustrative purposes.)

Printables

Printables are digital designs that people can download and print out for themselves. Printable sellers often create:

• Planners and to-do lists
• Calendars
• Spreadsheets
• Birthday, wedding, and anniversary cards
• Business cards
• Stickers
• Coloring pages
• Meal planners
• Party invitations
• Scavenger hunts and virtual games

If you’re looking to get into the printables market, it helps to be a skilled designer. There’s real money to be made here (some sellers reportedly earn six figures selling printables on Etsy) but you have to offer something unique to set yourself apart from your competitors.

How to get started

Pick a niche you’re interested in specializing in and try to create topical products that are in demand at the moment.

For instance, if you want to specialize in making cards, in addition to selling year-round cards like birthday and wedding cards, you can create seasonal cards for upcoming holidays, such as Halloween, Christmas, or Easter.

Depending on the type of product you want to create, you’ll need different tools. For example, if you want to create work spreadsheets, Excel might be enough. However, if you focus on party invitations or coloring pages, then you should probably get good at using tools like Canva.

Digital art

Any artistic work that you create with a computer falls under this umbrella. A few examples include digital paintings, animations, illustrations, and pixel art.

Selling digital art is one of the most popular creative side hustles for artists (or anyone who’s looking for a creative outlet). The tools and software for making art have become very accessible, which means there’s no barrier to becoming a digital art seller.

How to get started

It can be hard to create digital art that stands out, particularly now that AI art is proliferating so widely. It’ll help if you’re already skilled at creating traditional art; if you aren’t, put pencil to paper and start practicing.

If you already have a certain level of artistic competence, making the jump to digital art won’t be hard. You can watch tutorials on YouTube or take online courses if you don’t have any experience in this. Common tools include Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Procreate, although the exact tools you’ll need will depend on your chosen art form and medium.

If you’re trying to find your footing as a newbie, spend a while lurking on online forums devoted to digital art (e.g., the subreddit r/DigitalPainting). These can also be good places for connecting with other professionals.

Music

If you’re musically inclined, you can make money with music by selling your own songs (or other types of music, such as video game sounds, beats, and sound effects) as digital downloads.

How to get started

One of the benefits of selling online is that no matter how niche your audience is, you’ll be able to reach them (and these days, there’s an audience out there for nearly every type of music). That said, as with all other products, your music won’t sell itself. Promote yourself and try to build a fan base on social media.

The most popular sites for selling digital music downloads include:

• Bandcamp
• Gumroad
• Sellfy

Software

If you know how to code, you can create and sell your own software—a highly technical but potentially lucrative type of digital product.

Here are some of the most common kinds of software that programmers sell:

• Games
• Mobile apps
• Browser plugins

How to get started

When you create your software, consider pitching your idea on online discussion forums or X (formerly Twitter). This is a good way to get feedback early on. (Of course, if you have a truly novel idea, be cautious about this—you don’t want any rival coders to steal your idea.)

Try to build connections by being active on websites where other programmers and developers hang out, such as Github or r/Programming. You could also start a weekly or monthly newsletter on Medium or Substack to promote your products and solicit feedback from your growing user base.

You have a lot of options when it comes to selling digital downloads. We’ve listed three avenues you can take below:

1. Your own e-commerce website

If you’re a serious digital seller, it’s worth creating your own e-commerce website. This will give you full control over its design (i.e., your branding), and let you collect comprehensive data on your shop’s performance and customer behavior.

The catch is that building an e-commerce website is hard. You’ll need to put more effort into marketing than if you were selling on eBay, Amazon, or another large online marketplace with a built-in customer base. Still, if your website takes off, the rewards will be worth it.

Major platforms for building e-commerce websites

You can use these platforms to build and host a store for selling digital downloads:

2. Online marketplaces

Many merchants, particularly casual part-timers, prefer selling digital downloads on online marketplaces.

The process will be more or less the same whether you want to start selling on Etsy, eBay, Amazon, or another site entirely. You just need to set up an account with the platform and abide by its rules to start uploading and selling your digital wares.

This is easier and more straightforward than creating your own website, although it gives you less control as a seller. Moreover, you often have to pay various fees to sell on these sites, such as selling, listing, and transaction fees. To some extent, that’s also true when you create your own site with an e-commerce platform, but it will take a bigger bite out of your profits when you sell via a marketplace.

Popular marketplaces that accept digital downloads

Check out the most popular online marketplaces for selling different types of digital downloads:

3. Other digital distribution platforms

There are other digital commerce solutions that let you sell downloads without a website. You’ll do this by generating a download link and standalone sales page. You can then add the link to your social media accounts, email newsletter, or anywhere else that will be seen by potential customers.

If you have an existing platform, such as a blog or YouTube channel, and you’re looking to sell a few downloads without going to the trouble of setting up a whole store, this can be a convenient solution. The main downside is that if you decide you want to scale up your operation later, you’ll have to start from scratch, since you won’t even have a digital storefront to build off of.

Major digital distribution platforms

There are two popular distribution platforms like this for digital downloads: SendOwl and Digital Product Delivery (DPD). Check out the following table for a comparison between them.

Follow these tips to increase the sales of your digital downloads and take your business to the next level.

Do your homework before you start selling

When you brainstorm and decide what type of digital product you want to sell online, it’s important to validate your ideas by doing product research. Be sure to:

• Do keyword research: Using SEO research tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, and Ahrefs will give you insight into the potential of your ideas. If you fall in love with an idea but you discover there isn’t much interest, you don’t have to give it up, but it might be worth tweaking it a little.
• Check online discussions: Browse online discussion forums, subreddits, and Facebook groups in your niche to get people’s opinions about the products you want to sell.
• Create online surveys: Asking your target audience to take customized online surveys is one of the most effective ways to collect feedback on your products. Try to keep your surveys concise so that people won’t abandon them midway.
• Read product reviews: You can read your competitors’ product reviews in addition to your own. Doing so gives you the chance to learn from other people’s successes and mistakes.

Be open to pivoting your product development strategy as you collect feedback and data from users. More often than not, sellers don’t find success immediately. The ones who last learn through trial and error.

Use SEO to draw in customers

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of making your content attractive to search engines as well as real people. This will make it appear more prominently in Google’s search results.

SEO is a big topic, but you don’t have to become an expert to boost your chance of getting sales. There are a few simple on-page SEO actions you can take that will go a long way.

First off, create compelling product titles and descriptions with relevant keywords to increase your listings’ searchability and attract customers to your online shop. The text should be eye-catching while accurately describing your product.

In addition, it’s important to add clear pictures or videos of your products on your listings. You should also add alt text (descriptive text) to your images; this will help out vision-impaired people using screen readers, and it will also give Google an idea of what your images depict.

Don’t forget to regularly update and optimize your listings to ensure they remain relevant. If you get serious about e-commerce and decide to take your side hustle to the next level, look into other SEO strategies, such as acquiring backlinks and attracting customers with content marketing by starting a blog.

Market your products through other channels

Applying SEO best practices to your online shop often isn’t enough to increase sales significantly. You also have to actively promote your products for them to be seen. Try the following marketing methods:

• Social media promotion: Simply posting about your products and sharing links to your listing on your social media accounts can garner new customers.
• Email marketing: Creating an email list allows you to reach out to customers and build a relationship with them. You can include updates on your business, new products, and discounted offers in your emails.
• Paid advertising: If you have a budget, consider getting into paid advertising (e.g., by buying up Google Ads).

Whichever methods you choose, make sure they’re within your financial means. It’s a good idea to create a marketing plan so you don’t accidentally go over-budget.

Create incentives

Offering incentives every once in a while is beneficial to almost any online business. It helps build brand loyalty and increase customer retention.

There are a variety of incentives you can implement. For instance, you could bundle different products together for a discounted price, provide limited-time sales, or even create a loyalty program.

Protect your digital products

As mentioned, one of the downsides of selling digital downloads online is that your work is vulnerable to copyright theft. It’s crucial to take measures to protect your products and prevent other people from stealing them.

You can register your work with the US Copyright Office; you can do this for virtually all types of digital downloads, including e-books, songs, videos, photographs, and even spreadsheets.

In addition, consider watermarking your images to add another layer of protection to them. If you give each product a unique watermark, then if your downloads show up somewhere you aren’t expecting, you’ll be able to trace them back to the original buyer.