Make an Extra Income Selling Your Experience
If you don’t know it yet, you are already doing it here on hubpages or one of hubpages competitors. However, your articles, answers, and interaction can be turned into a profitable business if you are skilled and patient enough to carry on until you reap the desired result.
Warning: This is not a get rich scheme. They don’ work anyway and anyone promising success overnight is inevitably targeting your pocket regardless of the outcome.
What we are looking for here is to capitalize on your knowhow. So far you may have exploited writing articles and publishing them on revenue sharing websites only, but you can do more than that. Put simply, you can convert your passion, your knowledge about any topic into a profitable digital download.
How?
Write articles about your passion or choose articles you have already written and which fall under one topic and bundle them into one pdf ebook. You may think this is not a revolutionary idea and everyone can do it. Yes, but most people fall because they fail to market correctly their ebooks, while others make a good living of whatever they write.
Do you live on Venus?
If so you will start by creating a website and putting a lot of efforts in just customizing its look while shelling out money to secure your site from hackers, getting an expensive shopping cart, and having the best email marketing solution. The list of requirements may extend indefinitely to include video marketing, podcast marketing, social buzz, etc. The result will be astonishing if by the end of the month you sold enough to foot your monthly bills and paid these money-junkie services. Going that path for someone inexperienced is time consuming, frustrating, and simply suicidal, as unless you have a strong social presence and tons of followers on facebook and twitter with an insatiable buying syndrome you will most likely fail.
Welcome back to earth.
You don’t even need a website to sell your product and torment yourself with all the hassles above. Running a business is expensive, unpredictable, and full of surprises. Your only bet as a novice merchant is to sell your digital download ebook on a platform that would take care of everything from start to finish, so you won’t have to deal with security, hosting, or delivery, as everything would be on autopilot.
Does this exist?
Short answer: yes.
Long answer: yes but…
If you run a google search about selling a digital download you will stumble upon a huge list of different solutions and services that would make your head spin. But what we are looking for is a solution with a set and forget potential. We are not looking for a solution that requires a website from you as a novice merchant.
Why is that important?
Remember you have to cut down on expenses to the minimum. If a solution requires a website from your part to start selling then it won’t be viable at this stage. What you need is a solution with its own marketplace where your product can be hosted, featured, and sold without you doing anything big.
Who are the Contenders?
Most likely you will end up with your google search with the following contenders
The Big Fish
Payloadz: which temporarily qualifies in our listing here, but which will be written off immediately simply because payloadz charges a monthly fee for hosting your ebook on top of charging a transaction fee. Almost the same goes for e-junkie and other contenders with some or more differences.
Bottom line: These services may be good as they have a huge marketplace including about anything digital, but this may be also tip the scales in your disfavor as you are only selling one single ebook for a start and not dozens which may go unnoticed while you continue to pay a regular fee.
Tradebit: our next contender on the list. Tradebit is a payloadz alternative by excellence though it does not charge a regular fee and content itself with a per transaction fee. They charge 20% if you make less than $ 1500 per month + 10% to your affiliate. They have a selection of video tutorials to walk you through.
The Small fish
They are labeled small because of the monthly traffic they generate. They may have very advanced featured but still most of them are unbeknownst to the general public. Traffic is essential as you may not get anything if a marketplace doesn't have enough potential buyers.
Distribly: prides itself on a dozen of features that its competitors do not have. They take 10% transaction fee and relieve you from the headaches of monthly fees. Put simply, they only make money when you do. The other good thing about them is that if you choose to set up an affiliate program, payment to your affiliates will be automated as well. However, they have a low traffic and their current alexa rank is 1887193 at the moment of writing this article.
Scubbly: is even worse in term of traffic as it ranks below distribly, but you get the same advantages of listing your product for free and creating your affiliate id. There are other solutions of course but you can get the idea now of what is out there.
Final Thoughts
You might be tempted to think that it is preferable to start small with the small fish category, learning in the process how to market your product via affiliates while profiting from a free hosting along with a free marketplace listing. But in my opinion, you may opt for a better plan. List your product on different platforms at the same time to increase your chances. Tradebit is a good option for a start since they are ranked 6,414 by alexa ( compare that with the small fish traffic ) and whatever their commission is don’t let that scare you as long as there is no commitment from your part to pay a monthly fee.
