Selling Digital and Physical Products
Of course, the old fashioned way to make a lot of money is to actually sell a product that you create. There are a couple of GREAT sites that can give you the opportunity to sell products on and offline in a way that can be as simple as you like.
Cafepress.com is a site where you can publish books, cds dvds and pictures. You can sell ALL sorts of products with your image on a tshirt, mug, calendar, etc. Of course, those pictures can be text or landscape, people, etc and there are lots of possibilities. The idea with a site like Cafepress is that you don’t HAVE to buy and stock the products, they can be essentially made on demand and shipped directly to your customer. So, someone comes to your cafepress storefront and buys a mug with a great dog picture on it. Cafepress prints the picture on the cup, accepts payment, ships the product and sends you the money. Your involvement has been to create the product (and optionally market it), then collect the payment. Marketing is really the key here, you will get out of it what you put into it.
On the other extreme you can also use a site like cafepress as your vendor and buy your own product (usually with a bit of a discount (subtract the profit they give you and some bulk discounts are available too.)) So, in this case you would buy 50 of your coffee mugs with a dog picture, lay out the cash for them up front and then go about selling them yourself (likely offline – since online sales are so easy with cafepress.) In this case, you could use a variety of offline sales methods from consignment to door to door, or fundraiser style work, whatever suits you and the product.
A similar site for self publishing is lulu.com. I can’t tell you how fond I am of Lulu. The model is the same as cafepress, but the product selection is more specialized. They deal mostly in Print media (books/calendar/folios) and CDs/DVDs. One other nice plus is that you can sell digital downloads via lulu as well. I’ve made ~$430 or more over the last year via lulu and minimal advertising. (Mostly just a gateway website to my lulu.com items and I’ve done some promotion of that site via 1)adwords (which I’ve now discontinued and haven’t seen a drop off in sales) and 2) SEO of the gateway site/getting inbound links/etc. Most of the dollar amount of my sales there have come from digital music downloads. I’ve priced most things at $0.99 each which gives me $0.79 per sale.
If you’re a musician and want to “expand your distribution channel”, then take a look at cdbaby.com, they will take and sell your physical cd and with your agreement will make the audio tracks available as digital download sales through MANY online distribution channels for digital download sales. This is really a great resource for musicians!
There is also clickbank which does primarily payment handling for digital products (downloadable ebooks and software mostly.)
As for ideas on distributing other digital products… here is a digital point thread about ways to distribute an ebook electronically. (Receiving payment from paypal, other payment handlers, etc.)
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