How I made a digital product in one hour that sells for $400 every month
Right now, my favourite side hustle is to sell printables on Etsy. I started up with a brand new shop in July, and by September, I had a steady revenue of $1 000 per month.
The beauty of selling printables is that you make the product once, and then you can sell it over and over again — completely automated. How’s that for a magic trick?!
Let me just pause you here for a second, and ask if you’ve heard about printables on Etsy as a side hustle idea before? If not, you can swing by this article to get a better overview.
Printables are digital design products, usually sold as pdfs, made for the buyer to print at home. There are all sorts of printables — from wedding products to nursery art to party games, greeting cards, calendars and Christmas tags.
And lots of people are making money from this. Cody Berman of Gold City Ventures, who made the course I took when I first started, got hooked on Etsy printables when he opened his shop and soon after went on a skiing holiday with his girlfriend — only to make over $800 in passive income during the getaway.
My revenue in the first months
My experience was quite similar, since I got to $1000/month only two months after opening my shop in July. And now I am hooked, too! These are my stats for revenue from July to November 2022:
As you can see, I made around $1000 in September, October and November (the stats are in NOK, but you can divide by 10 to get the value in US dollars) that very first year. Not bad for making passive income on Etsy!
My bestselling product
When you look around Etsy shops and see all these products priced at around $10, it might not look very lucrative.
But it really adds up! My bestselling product has been sold 86 times over the past three months, making a total of $1200. Yup, that is just one product!
I made it about three months ago, and sales have been increasing steadily, so I expect the total earnings will be considerably more in a year from now.
Amazing pay for just one hour of work, right?
People often ask me how long it takes to make these printables.
And the answer is, of course: Well, it depends.
It depends on what kind of product you are making. It depends on the quality, and on how quick you are in Canva. But, actually, I think it mostly depends on how strategically you choose to work.
Some people I talk to say that they spend considerably more than an hour making each printable. My guess is that they are not always working with a focus on maximum revenue per hour of work.
But I am here to tell you that it is super-easy to cut that time down to an average of one hour per product. Below are my four favorite tricks:
Always make products in batches
Yes, I make complicated products, too. I sell a lot of products that arguably take a lot more than one hour to make. But my focus is always on the average time spent.
So if I spend 3–4 hours on making a product, I always, always, always make at least five different versions of the same product.
In other words, I make the product — and then I use Canva to change the fonts/colours/graphics four times, so that I get five products of the same kind but with completely different looks, appealing to different customer groups.
Changing the fonts etc usually takes 5–10 minutes. Sometimes, it takes less than one minute! One minute, to add a new product in my shop!
With this strategy, I can easily make five products in less than five hours — even if I sometimes spend three hours on the first one.
Always use templates
When I made my first designs, I started from scratch. I spent hours on designs that, in the end, I never sold to anyone because it wasn’t that impressive. Imagine my joy when I discovered templates!
In short, templates are designs that are already made, so that instead of making the whole design from scratch, you can get the complicated-looking and beautiful designs done in a matter of minutes.
You only change fonts, colours and perhaps add some sprinkles of joy through a bit of graphic art — and you are good to go. Templates are the main reason why making gorgeous designs in 5–10 minutes is possible in Canva, even with no prior knowledge of design.
If you’re a newbie, please save yourself the time and stress, and get yourself some useful templates. Trust me, your future self will thank you!
Always make bundles
Bundles are great for two things when your focus is maximum revenue at minimum number of hours. For one, it is a great way to increase the revenue of the shop.
Here’s why: Say for simplicity that all of your products cost 7 dollars each. When a customer comes to the shop, they are likely to buy one or two products.
But if you have made a bundle of four or five products for 15 dollars, that is arguably a much better deal for the customer (even though they really only meant to get one product for 7 dollars).
As these products are digital, it cost you nothing to give the customer five products instead of one — and you are more than doubling your revenue from that particular customer.
In addition, bundling is great in order to stock your shop quickly. As you’ve already made the products, the only thing you need to make in order to make a bundle is the listing photos — further decreasing the average time it takes you to make each listing.
Win-win, in other words!
And hey, that product I mentioned that sells for $400 every month? That is actually a bundle. So I made five different products (which are also selling every month as individual products, but at a much lower rate than the bundle) and then I just bundled them to make this best seller.
Always batch the listings
In addition to batching the products, I always batch the listings. For instance, I make six nice mockup photos in Canva, and then I duplicate all six photos — and just switch the picture of the actual product, keeping the rest the same. I use the same strategy for finding keywords and writing the description — just copy and change a couple of keywords in order to represent a new colour and style.
Working this way, it is quite easy to make five quite complicated products in an afternoon. The first two-three hours is spent on making the product, and then the next two are spent on duplicating the product into four more product with different colours and fonts — and making the listings of all five.
So when was the last time you built an passive income stream of $400 in only one hour?
Inspired? I love sharing tips on how to make printables. If you have an hour to invest in learning a new and very profitable way to make passive income, I recommend this free workshop, where you learn a lot of the most important strategies. (This is from the course I took when I first started.)
You’re also most welcome to sign up for free email course where I share my exact strategies on how I grew a $1000 monthly passive income in only two months. Enjoy!
PS. This story contains an affiliate link. If you buy through that link, I will receive a small compensation — at no cost for you, of course. I only recommend products I use myself and love — and think that you will love, too.
